We started getting a lot of spam comments that were generated by bots for marketing purposes. It got to be really annoying to see and delete all of the notification emails that we would get, so we wanted to figure out a way to stop spam WordPress comments and figured out a way to cut the spammers off at the knees. From what we saw, a website owner would pay a programmer to send a bot that makes spam comments on any WordPress site that it could find that would allow it. So, if you can detect whether an actual person created a comment rather than a bot, then you can eliminate spam comments. Luckily for us, you can detect that, by using Google’s reCAPTCHA product. reCAPTCHA runs a turing test and sees whether a user is a real person or a computer-generated one – if a user is a real person, then we can allow them to comment. There are 3 steps involved in getting rid of spam WordPress comments.
STEP 1: Install Advanced noCaptcha Plugin
To stop getting spam WordPress comments, start by searching for ‘advanced nocaptcha’ and it will pull up Advanced noCaptcha & invisible Captcha.
Install the Advanced noCaptcha plugin and then activate it.
STEP 2: Get and Add Google Keys
Then, hover over settings and click on Advanced noCaptcha in the dropdown menu.
Click on the Google link that shows up under Google Keys to sign up for Google’s reCaptcha product.
Copy the site key and secret key generated after signing up for reCaptcha and paste them into the Advanced nocaptcha settings page.
STEP 3: Select Forms to enable reCaptcha on.
Select the version you want to use, V3 is the latest as of the date of this post. Then, select the forms you want to enable reCaptcha on, see below as an example:
Make sure to click on the save changes button at the bottom of the page and you are good to go!