Which plugins you use to prevent spammers from spamming your Wordpress sites?
Hello to all webmasters here. Wordpress platform is becoming more popular and I'm pretty sure each of us owns one or more Wordpress sites. My question is, which plugins do you use to prevent the spammers from spamming your comment sections, your contact forms?
Currently I'm using Akismet and Accurate Form Data to prevent form spammers. It works by checking if the email/physical address users enter into my site forms really exists. The plugin works great for me.
Can you share your favourite plugin to avoid spammers?
Wordpress plugin to check if an email is valid: Test Email Address
Greg K posted this at 21:36 — 23rd September 2014.
He has: 2,145 posts
Joined: Nov 2003
I don't do Wordpress for blogging, so i never have to worry about comments, so my answer is for just things like contact form and other forms specific for a page....
I don't use any plugin for them. Since I'm a programmer and my clients don't need to (or want to) edit the forms, I just hand code them all from a template I use. It is actually part of my custom caching system I put in place for wordpress, after the page renders, it looks for [[FORM:form_name]] and replaces it with the form code or results from processing it. Some of the things implemented:
Honeypot (a field labeled URL that is indented off the screen that needs to be left blank, but bots see)
Time Checking: Forms as set to only accept a submit within a certain period of time from when it was rendered, usually an hour. Started that when I had to clean up a site where a bot had learned the form and just started directly submitting spam over and over to it.
For sites hosted on my server, it gets passed to an API I wrote that will do a few checks for on the submission, such as geolocation, keyword triggering and IP use threshold per hour. If it it trips anything, it will store the submission into a database, and require the submitter to click on a link in an email to release it.
With just those in place it has cut down on the junk e-mail my clients received to almost nothing. After a couple of months, the keyword tracking was added to and tweaked nicely.
-Greg
Megan posted this at 12:56 — 24th September 2014.
She has: 11,421 posts
Joined: Jun 1999
I always used Akismet on Wordpress, and it worked well for me as long as it was kept up to date. More recently I started moderating all comments on certain poasts (and had a plugin for that but I can't remember what it was called ... my site never got put back after we moved servers a year ago). A lot of comments are complete garbage anyway, so moderating them keeps the quality up.
On Drupal I don't think I work on anything that has open comments... here on the forums we use Spambot module, which runs new registrations through Stop Forum Spam.
Megan
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