Contact Forms

When I was speaking about Blogging last week I happened to mention the amount of spam I was getting had increased drastically over the past few months. One of the participants suggested I use Akismet, which of course I do. It’s a free and you will find it under the Widgets. When you install it, you’ll need to request an API key. Scroll down until you see the option of being a single user so you won’t need to pay for the service.

It has worked fairly well, but the problem is the higher ranking you get the more spam you’ll get.

So I turned off the Comments (Go to Settings, lower left, then Discussions and under the Default Discussion Settings uncheck “Allow people to post comments on new articles”. Then save the change.

Then I went to the Plugins and found “Tiny Contact Form”. I installed the plugin and activated it. Then I had to go to the Settings again and at the bottom it will have a tab for “Tiny Contact Form”. Update the form by inserting your email address in the “To” field. I checked the “Captcha” box which will also eliminate more of the spam.

Go back to the Widgets and drag the Tiny Contact Form to the right.

It will save me from no less than 30 spam messages a week on each of my blogs. The waste of time spam creates is ridiculous, so this will make a big difference for me.