iCan Marketing

Worpdress is absolutely fantastic. It is so flexible and the number of themes available are huge. I use it not only for blogs but also as a content management system for other sites. It works great for creating content sites, article sites and lots of different automated solutions. However, with that said you definitely do not want to run it right out of the box.

Choosing or creating a theme is always the first step for me. Then, installing plugins, getting mod rewrite working, turning off the rich text editor (I can’t stand that thing), changing my password, ect… One of the biggest problems with using Wordpress or any blog software for that matter is comment spam. Frankly if you don’t do anything to protect yourself then you probably deserve to get spammed. Thanks to a great plugin called Did You Pass Math? and a tip from Shoemoney I’ve found a way to eliminate 99% of comment spam right out of the gate.

Installing the Did You Pass Math plugin is a piece of cake and an automatic requirement for every Wordpress install I do. Just upload it to the plugin folder and Activate it in the admin dashboard and you’ll get the nice little random math equation that requires an answer before a comment is accepted. It’s so much easier than setting up and dealing with captchas.

The second thing to do is rename the wp-comments-post.php file to something else. Then find the line in both comments-popup.php and comments.php (both are in your theme folder) and replace the text wp-comments-post.php with whatever new file name you came up with. The reason for doing this is that automated comment spam bots look for this file to try and post a comment to your blog. Change it, and you’ll defeat a large portion of them from ever attempting.