396 CHAPTER 14 INSTALLING AND CONFIGURING WORDPRESS (Free web hosting with ftp)
396 CHAPTER 14 INSTALLING AND CONFIGURING WORDPRESS Before a Comment Appears The first setting in this section, An administrator must approve the comment, means that an administrator must approve every single comment (including TrackBacks and Pingbacks) before it is displayed on your site. To that end, all comments are placed in a moderation queue. This is the most effective anti-comment spam measure. Nothing gets past WordPress, because you must approve each comment before it is posted on your site. As you can imagine, enabling comment approval is the most inconvenient setting for you and your readers. They must wait to see their comments appear, so you lose out on the immediacy of the blog-commenting system. This can have quite an effect on the ability to build and maintain a community based around your blog. You must also process these comments by hand, preferably at regular intervals in order to maintain some kind of immediacy for your community. That can be a lot of work, given that some comment spammers use automated scripts that can submit many hundreds of comments to your blog each day. This setting is really a last resort. The next setting, Comment author must fill out name and e-mail, simply requires that a comment author fill in the name and e-mail settings in order to post a comment. While not too exacting (you don t need to add a real e-mail address), this setting will defeat a couple of the more basic spam scripts. The final setting in this section, Comment author must have a previously approved comment, works in conjunction with its predecessor. If a comment author enters the same name and e-mail address as that of a previously approved comment, then WordPress will allow the comment to appear on the site immediately. Conveniently, WordPress will set a cookie in a visitor s browser that will allow it to prepopulate the username, e-mail, and URL for that visitor. Comment Moderation The next group of settings are more directly concerned with defeating comment spam. First, you can set a threshold for the number of links a comment can contain before it is considered to be possible spam and placed in the comment moderation queue. A common feature of one type of spam is dozens of links to sites of a dubious nature. This setting (with a default setting of 2) addresses that. The next setting is a space for a list of trigger words. If a comment has any of these words in it (in any part of the comment), WordPress will immediately place the comment in the moderation queue. For convenience, there is a link to a centrally maintained list of common spam words. You can visit that page and copy the list there into your own list. Comment Blacklist The final section of the Discussion Options page is a comment blacklist. If any of the words in this list are found in a comment, that comment does not even appear in the moderation queue. Be careful which words you put in this list. If any word matches and even partial words can match you will not even be notified by e-mail about the comment, unlike with all of the other methods. Thus, you will not normally get chance to approve a comment that matches the blacklisted words here. In fact, blacklisted comments (and ones that you designate as spam during moderation) are still in the database. WordPress does not currently provide any way to access them once they are marked as spam. However, at least one WordPress plug-in (http://www.coldforged.org/ paged-comment-editing-plugin/) allows you to browse through spam comments and reclassify them.
You want to have a cheap webhost for your apache application, then check apache web hosting services.