WordPress Comment Blacklist: A Complete Beginner’s Guide

If you have your own website, one of the most engaging sections of your website has to be the comments. Comments are very useful to interact with your website visitors. It has been a known fact as we have also mentioned previously in articles like bulk deleting comments, WordPress comment moderation, disabling comments, adding images to comments, and many more. As a result, you can know a lot about your website through them. 

Although comments can be very helpful, they can give you a very hard time as well. Many commenters and spammers will try to add various unnecessary and unrelated comments on your website. It is very important to blacklist them. Luckily, if you use WordPress, you also get a WordPress comment blacklist for your website which is extremely easy to use. 

What is WordPress Comment Blacklist?

As the name implies itself, the WordPress comment blacklist is an option provided by WordPress for the comments on your website. It is used to blacklist some of the words that the spammers would often use and delete the comment if it contains the words. This feature can be used if you have a lot of commenters on your website who comment for promoting their products. There might also be a ton of comments which use bad, foul, offensive, and cuss words. So, if you want to keep your website free from these kinds of words, you can easily use the WordPress comment blacklist. 

The blacklisted words will be searched from either the name, content, URL, email or IP address. They can be even extracted from phrases. For example, if you blacklist the phrase “imp”, the comment with the word “important” will also be blacklisted. You can then use the WordPress comment blacklist in two different ways. It can either be used by blacklisting the words and moderating the comments by approving them later. Or, you can just delete the comments with blacklisted words directly to trash without any moderation. We’ll show both the methods that you can use in this tutorial.

Complete Guide to WordPress Comment Blacklist:

As mentioned earlier, the comment blacklisting can be done with two different methods:

• WordPress Comment Blacklist with Moderation
• Deleting the comment directly from WordPress Comment Blacklist 

Method 1: WordPress Comment Blacklist with Moderation

Moderation with blacklist is used more often as you can manually approve the comments for your website. Some of the comments might be genuine even if it contains a blacklisted word and might be deleted. So, depending on the words this option can be very beneficial for you.

For this method, all you need to do is go to Settings>>Discussion. You will be able to see the comments settings here. Then, find the comment moderation section of your settings. Here, you will see an option to limit the number of links and then a text box where you can add the blacklisted words. Add the words which you want to add to the comment blacklist in the textbox. Here, the word is spam. And then click on Save Changes at the bottom of the page.

Once you’ve done that, you will have to manually approve the comments that contain the blacklisted words. To do this, go to Comments from your dashboard. You can view your pending comment on the All tab of the comments as well as the Pending tab. If you want to display the comment on your dashboard, click on Approve. Or else, you can either send it to the Spam or Trash.

Method 2: Deleting the comment directly from WordPress Comment Blacklist

This method of WordPress comment blacklist is preferred if you want to keep your website free from any type of offensive words. This is quite similar to the method used earlier using moderation. The only difference is that the blacklisted comments will be directly sent to the trash.

For this, all you need to do is go to Settings>>Discussion from your dashboard. Then, find the Comment Blacklist option and add the words you want to blacklist for the comments into the textbox. Here, the word is spammer. And then click on Save Changes at the bottom of the page.

If any of the comments contain blacklisted words, it will be sent directly to the trash. You can view them later by going to the Trash tab on the Comments section of your dashboard.

Wrapping up:

Now, we expect that you have got the idea about WordPress comment blacklist. However, you can easily use the comment blacklist to keep your website entirely free of spam and hateful comments. The really unnecessary offensive content found on the comments can also be entirely avoided by using the WordPress comment blacklist. 

We hope that you found this article helpful and interesting. Here are some more tutorials and posts that you might like as well:

• How to Add Audio to WordPress: A Beginner’s Guide
• A Beginner’s Guide on How to Disable WordPress Trackbacks
• How to Use a Custom WordPress Login Form Plugin