One of the worst things about the Internet is spam!  If you’ve had a blog for more than 5 seconds, chances are your comments are constantly being flooded with spam comments.  A really effective plugin is Akismet, but even it doesn’t eliminate spam – it only filters it.

A very simple way to keep a lot of comments from even making their way into your spam folder is to disable HTML tags in your comments.  WordPress allows certain HTML tags in the comments section, and if you take a look at some of your spam, chances are it has HTML in it (like <strong> or <a?).  This is because most spam is generated by bots or scripts.

To disable HTML tags in your comments, click on the “Editor” option listed under “Appearance” on the Dashboard.  From there, select the functions.php file in your theme and insert the following code:

// This will occur when the comment is posted
function plc_comment_post( $incoming_comment ) {

// convert everything in a comment to display literally
$incoming_comment['comment_content'] = htmlspecialchars($incoming_comment['comment_content']);

// the one exception is single quotes, which cannot be #039; because WordPress marks it as spam
$incoming_comment['comment_content'] = str_replace( “‘”, ‘&apos;’, $incoming_comment['comment_content'] );

return( $incoming_comment );
}

// This will occur before a comment is displayed
function plc_comment_display( $comment_to_display ) {

// Put the single quotes back in
$comment_to_display = str_replace( ‘&apos;’, “‘”, $comment_to_display );

return $comment_to_display;

Simple as that!