Block Spam in Luminate CMS

by Firefly Partners • 11.11.2015

Much like Rocky took (and threw) punches while he was in the ring, your website or blog can definitely take the proverbial “punch” when it comes to comment spammers. You know, the ones about the latest miracle drugs, a profitable offshore investment opportunity, and that seemingly familiar story about a Nigerian prince. Upper cut, cross or hook, spam comes in many different forms, but one thing is for sure: it gets in the way of your message.

Despite all of that pain, offering a comment form on your site is invaluable. Comments are a great way to engage your participants, get feedback on your site content and provide a forum to exchange ideas. Luckily for those of you using Luminate CMS – the system makes it easy to add comments to blog posts and stories to drive more engagement on your site. It also has some handy options to help block those spam hits coming at ya.

Here are a few brilliant ideas for validating comments to help block spam:

• Require each comment to include an email address and a valid CAPTCHA as part of the submission process. (Wondering what a CAPTCHA is? Learn more here.) This additional entry goes a long way to reducing spam, and is enough for many sites. 

• For one of our clients, however, spam was still getting through. Although the Nature Conservancy Canada site was configured to require administrator approval before being published, manually deleting spam was both tedious and time consuming.  They noticed that a common feature of each spam comment was that it had a link in it, so we came up with a workaround using jQuery script (a well-written JavaScript code) to block comment submissions that had links in them and alert the commenter that links weren’t allowed. It’s a perfect one, two punch to keep spammers out of the ring while still allowing legitimate commenters a place to engage.

• Try a 3^rd party commenting platform, like Disqus. Users create a free account (which is often a barrier to spammers), and can post comments on any blogs that use Disqus. It’s user-friendly and has a nice conversation thread layout, and there are several custom capabilities that you can take advantage of as well. Fair warning: it can be a little tricky to implement, so you might need someone with a technical background to get it set up on your site.

Need help customizing your CMS installation? Get a quote from Firefly.