Help me oh STW IT-literate types, you’re my only hope!

I’ve got a website where I just put up examples of my illustration work. It’s a standard WordPress job. Nothing fancy at all. I like to keep things simple.

As is the way of the world I tend to do most of my updates, promotion etc on my Facebook, Instagram and Twitter page, as you ‘engage’ with people far more. Websites are a bit… you know…. 1990’s.

As a result, I don’t tend to update it very often. I’ve just opened it for the first time in a couple of weeks and I’ve got over 7,000 comments on there. I’ve disabled the comments so that they have to be approved before they actually appear on the site, so I’ll have to delete all these. I don’t even bother reading them. They’re all adverts for exactly the kind of stuff you’d expect. Grot, viagra

Obviously, this is all bots, trawling sites, but what can I do to stop it? I’m a completely IT illiterate.

To be honest, I’d happily ditch the website altogether, but I still do get business through it, with people contacting me through it

Any suggestions welcome, oh wise ones

Does it have one of those annoying “prove you are a human” turing test things?

Not this one is it 🤩🤪🤪🤪🤪🤪🤪🤣🥊

Make sure there’s an obvious way to contact you and leave comments disabled? Otherwise, and if you have a contact form then you still need to, add human tests.

Cheers guys. Just turned off all comments on all pages in the settings. And my anti-spam software needed updating

I do get the odd bit of spam through the ‘Contact Me’ function, but it is only the odd thing

Are comments actually adding any value to you? If not I imagine it should be possible to disable them completely.

If you want to keep comments enabled, as I recall WP has anti-spam plugins which do a reasonable job. It has been a while since I had a WP site but I when I did I used Askimet:

https://codex.wordpress.org/Combating_Comment_Spam

That’s what I’ve just done Tom. The comments generally add nothing. I’ve had the odd person contact me via a comment, then email me as I’ve not seen it in the mountains of spam. So I’ve just turned the lot off

I needed to update my Askimet software. Now I’ve done so, its letting me disable comments on everything

I use the Disqus plugin to handle the comments and it has an in built anti-spam system which works quite well for me.

Stop signing up for grot and viagra trials?