Killing WordPress Comment Spam for Fun and Profit

I recently had to “reboot” this blog as I had to remove it from a wordpress-multisite installation and serve it as a standalone instance. By the way, if you’re starting a new WordPress project, avoid multisite installations like the plague, they really don’t work well and are an expensive pain to spin off, as the plugins that actually work for multisite installations are typically much more expensive than the (often free) ones that do not require that capability.

This aside, one of the big problems you will come up against when administering a “default” wordpress installation is comment spam. Basically you will see hundreds of comments on your posts pile up, but when you actually have a look at those comments you will quickly realize that almost all of them will be essentially from bots that attempt to spam your posts with links. But you can avoid this with a few very simple steps that will stop the spammers dead in their tracks.

WordPress Settings

The relevant settings can be found by logging into your WordPress instance as an administrator, then from the Dashboard going to Settings > Discussion.

Default post settings

The first thing to do is decide whether you want to allow comments on your posts at all. It’s not as obvious as thing as it might seem. If you try to measure engagement by relevant comments on WordPress, you will likely be very disappointed. A much better measure of engagement is how much discussion you can generate on social media sites on which you share your posts. So, the easiest way to cut down on spam is to disable comments entirely by unselecting the checkbox next to Allow people to submit comments on new posts and skipping the rest of this article.

Other comment settings

If you do allow comments, the most effective way to cut down on the amount of spam is to select Users must be registered and logged in to comment in this section. Spammers are just not going to go through the trouble of registering as a user and will just skip your site, which is the best scenario.

Before a comment appears

Unless you expect that your blog will be a particularly busy one in terms of users comments — and in 2026 that is not a very likely eventuality — make sure to select both the Comment must be manually approved and Comment author must have a previously approved comment options. These will make sure that spam comments do not appear under your posts by default. I believe that those are the default settings in WordPress, but you’ll want to double-check.

Comment Moderation

At this point your installation is already pretty secured, but to “bulletproof” things you should change the Hold a comment in the queue if it contains X or more links option to 1 instead of the default 2.

Conclusion

Just adjusting your WordPress settings in the ways described above should cut down the spam submitted to your site by 99%. Sure, having a large number of comments on posts may seem encouraging if you’re starting a new project, but what you really want is engagement, not people using your site to advertise (mostly) porn and other questionable sites. And in my experience the engagement will actually come from the forums and social media sites on which your share your posts, and not those left on your site.

Thanks for attending my TED talk…

On Homelessness in Montreal

Here’s something I posted this past week on reddit but I feel it really needs to be reposted here.

I live next to the Palais des Congres, basically ground zero for homelessness in Montreal because it’s a public space so unless someone gets violent or annoying to the public they’re left in peace. For the most part the homeless don’t bother the residents, and vice-versa.

But it’s really depressing. Once you see someone new hang out here, you get to see them grow old really quickly. The general population thinks that “they messed up their lives with drugs”, which is true in some cases, but in most cases it’s the reverse — imagine that you have nothing to do all day (who’s going to hire the homeless?) and nowhere private to go to, ever. Well then, drugs quickly become the cheapest ticket to feeling good, no matter in how limited a capacity. They don’t have any “entertainment options”. Even assuming that a lot of them go to the Old Brewery Mission at night, the mission closes during the day, so they come right back. There are 2-3 distinct groups, overall they seem to respect each other’s “turf”.

Thing is, the general population — “normies” — really have no idea how close they are to being in this situation themselves. Yeah, we all dream of being millionaires or whatever, but we’re all infinitely closer to being out in the street than we are to owning a big yacht. One illness, one screw-up at work, one mistake in behavior, and that can be it. Much as people like to lie to themselves about this type of utter destitution being due to moral failings, unless you’re born into old money you’re probably teetering on the edge of that existence.

Yes, there are government programs. But we need to recognize that every year those programs are less funded than the previous year. Since the 1970s the percentage of the tax burden assumed by corporations and rich people has been on a steady decline, and that of “normies” has been rising. That started in the USA, but Canada quickly followed suit, because “we must be competitive”.

Well, “being competitive” sounds great as long as you’re on the side of the “winners”. But it necessarily also means that every year, there are more and more people on the “losing” side of the equation. It’s a sad reality.

That’s capitalism for ya.

On the usefulness of AI…

Today I gave AI a chance. It didn’t go well.

It’s not the first time I give it a shot. In previous attempts I have found that AI, in that case CoPilot, is OK at coding, as long as you personally figure out the exact algorithm you want to turn into a python script and tell the bot exactly what you want it to do step by step. So I’m not necessarily opposed to the technology altogether.

However today I tried to get the Claude bot to translate a document that was maybe half a page long. I sat there and after a while thought “well this is taking a while”. But I was patient. And after several minutes, voila! I got a message that I was “out of messages”.

And even worse, there was seemingly no way for me to save the prerequisites and strategy for the translation so that the next time I have to deal with the same situation, Claude wouldn’t have to do all this extra processing.

The source and target languages are very common. The file format was very common. The amount of text was frankly trivial. And I have nothing to show for all this. At least if a human was working on this I would have had at least a partial translation.

Words fail me in expressing how much of a disappointment this whole experiment turned out to be. This is why companies are spending hundreds of billions of dollars? This is the “future of work”? This is why it’s practically impossible to find a job in the software industry these days?

What a sh*t show.

Discouraged.

I walk my dog Taz at least twice every day. Sometimes the walks are long, sometimes they’re short. We travel through interesting places in Montreal and see what’s going on. I’ve always made a point of keeping a smile on my face while we’re out.

But today… today I just couldn’t. I tried, but I can’t keep that shit up anymore.

We’re now in the month of June. For the past 5 months now I’ve been looking for a job. Everyday I go to the places where job offers used to be found, and if I find jobs for which I’m at all qualified I apply. I’ve optimized my resume for ATS’s twice now, once using Gemini, once using Claude, and although I’ve gotten 4 leads IN TOTAL from all this effort I’m still looking. And frankly it’s taking a heavy toll on me.

Last year I made the ultimate mistake of accepting a job at Bombardier for which I didn’t even apply. They lied to me about the job being remote, and overall it was a complete shit show. And the worst part was that there was a 2-month gap between the offer and the start of the job so that burned two months of EI coverage pointlessly, so that now my coverage has run out and despite cutting my expenses to the bone I’m seeing my money gradually run out. Another $1600 gone today because, well, rent.

The level of anxiety I’m dealing with is off the charts. My tinnitus was already annoying before but now it feels so loud and unrelenting I sometimes think it must be audible by other people. My depression meds feel less effective with each and every day that passes. I used to enjoy walking with Taz, but now I find myself constantly getting impatient with the poor dog.

Meanwhile, all I see around are corporations sinking BILLIONS of dollars into the monetary black hole that is AI, for the sole purpose of getting rid of human employees because they get in the way of billionaires’ greed, while they also lay off tens or even hundreds of thousands of employees, which only compounds the unemployment issue. We live in a capitalist society where one needs money just to survive. Looking to the future I really cannot see any hope.

I have 25 years’ experience in technical documentation, I’ve also worked as a developer, I’ve set up documentation infrastructures for companies, but it seems that whatever I have, in terms of capability or experience, is something nobody wants. My personal life fares no better. I am beginning to seriously question whether I fit anywhere in this world, and whether I ever have.

This has to end. And it will, one way or another.