There are different ways of preventing your WordPress blog from becoming the target of spam and abuse. Which method you use will depend on a number of factors. I have used Akismet succesfully for example on a number of blogs, however I came up against a problem with a press release website.
I had developed this site using WordPress and with the addition of Plugins it was designed to be a Press Release Center allowing PR Professionals and marketing experts to submit their news releases for online publication. I developed the site and tested it, everything seemed to work fine. We tested it in-house and then decided to go for a soft launch. We checked http://jkhanok.com and for the first few hours nothing. Where were all the submissions that we had been promised? That is right, the Akismet Plugin had grabbed them as spam.
This was going to be a problem, I certainly did not want the submissions to be a free for all for every idiot online, but I did not want every other press release trashed because it looked ‘spammy’ to Akismet. So I had to take a look at what other options were out there.
There are seveal user friendly ways of verifying your sites visitors before taking their comments or other submissions. Here is a round up of some of the best.
AKISMET http://akismet.com/
The daddy of anti-spam measures, however as I pointed out sometimes it does not do the job (by doing its job too well). I think Akismet is the best automated spam killer that actually gets better as it learns from the whole community marking new spam comments as spam. It just WORKS.
Block-Spam-By-Math
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/block-spam-by-math/
This plugin protects registration, login and comment forms from spambots by adding a simple mathematical equation to your comments form. For example “what is 4+3 ?”. This approach should give you 100% anti-spam protection against BOTS, I know of no automated spambot that can get round this right now.
NoSpamNX
http://www.svenkubiak.de/nospamnx-en/
The anti-comment-spam-plugins that I have focused on so far in this article requireuser interaction, e.g. captcha or math-comment-spam-protection to defend you against automated comment spambots. Other scripts use JavaScript and/or Sessions, check each comment against common spam phrases or modify your comment template.
This is a little different. NoSpamNX focuses on handling automated comment-spam without these measures.NoSpamNX adds additional formfields to your comment form, invisible to the users. If a spambot fills these fields blindly (which 99.9% of all spambots do), the comment will not be published. You can decide if you want to block these spambots, mark them as spam or put them in moderation queue.
Quiz
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/quiz/
If you want to go further than just verfiying that the person posting a comment is a human you can go one step further. You can ensure they have read your post prior to submitting a response. I do like this plugin, whilst it will drastically reduce the amount of feebdack you get on your blog or web site I am fairly sure the quality will increase significantly.
You can write a new Quiz question and answer for each post, fall back on a default question, or have no question at all. Commenters must correctly answer the question before their comment is submitted. Answers are checked by a caseless comparison. So spelling must be correct but uppercase letters do not matter.
Short questions with one word andswers are best. However you can enter multiple correct answers, separated by commas. For example, if you enter an answer as: 6, six, half dozen Either “6″ or “six” or “half dozen” will be accepted as correct.
http:BL
http://omninoggin.com/
This WordPress Plugin allows you to verify IP addresses of clients connecting to your blog against the Project Honey Pot database. This takes anti-spam one steo further and will help protect your blog against email harvesters and other malicous visitors as well as spambots. That is because http:BL WordPress Plugin will actually block any potentially harmful clients from accessing your blog, they will be denied entry.
No related posts.
5 Anti-Spam Tools for WordPress
There are different ways of preventing your WordPress blog from becoming the target of spam and abuse. Which method you use will depend on a number of factors. I have used Akismet succesfully for example on a number of blogs, however I came up against a problem with a press release website.
I had developed this site using WordPress and with the addition of Plugins it was designed to be a Press Release Center allowing PR Professionals and marketing experts to submit their news releases for online publication. I developed the site and tested it, everything seemed to work fine. We tested it in-house and then decided to go for a soft launch. We checked http://jkhanok.com and for the first few hours nothing. Where were all the submissions that we had been promised? That is right, the Akismet Plugin had grabbed them as spam.
This was going to be a problem, I certainly did not want the submissions to be a free for all for every idiot online, but I did not want every other press release trashed because it looked ‘spammy’ to Akismet. So I had to take a look at what other options were out there.
There are seveal user friendly ways of verifying your sites visitors before taking their comments or other submissions. Here is a round up of some of the best.
AKISMET http://akismet.com/
The daddy of anti-spam measures, however as I pointed out sometimes it does not do the job (by doing its job too well). I think Akismet is the best automated spam killer that actually gets better as it learns from the whole community marking new spam comments as spam. It just WORKS.
Block-Spam-By-Math
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/block-spam-by-math/
This plugin protects registration, login and comment forms from spambots by adding a simple mathematical equation to your comments form. For example “what is 4+3 ?”. This approach should give you 100% anti-spam protection against BOTS, I know of no automated spambot that can get round this right now.
NoSpamNX
http://www.svenkubiak.de/nospamnx-en/
The anti-comment-spam-plugins that I have focused on so far in this article requireuser interaction, e.g. captcha or math-comment-spam-protection to defend you against automated comment spambots. Other scripts use JavaScript and/or Sessions, check each comment against common spam phrases or modify your comment template.
This is a little different. NoSpamNX focuses on handling automated comment-spam without these measures.NoSpamNX adds additional formfields to your comment form, invisible to the users. If a spambot fills these fields blindly (which 99.9% of all spambots do), the comment will not be published. You can decide if you want to block these spambots, mark them as spam or put them in moderation queue.
Quiz
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/quiz/
If you want to go further than just verfiying that the person posting a comment is a human you can go one step further. You can ensure they have read your post prior to submitting a response. I do like this plugin, whilst it will drastically reduce the amount of feebdack you get on your blog or web site I am fairly sure the quality will increase significantly.
You can write a new Quiz question and answer for each post, fall back on a default question, or have no question at all. Commenters must correctly answer the question before their comment is submitted. Answers are checked by a caseless comparison. So spelling must be correct but uppercase letters do not matter.
Short questions with one word andswers are best. However you can enter multiple correct answers, separated by commas. For example, if you enter an answer as: 6, six, half dozen Either “6″ or “six” or “half dozen” will be accepted as correct.
http:BL
http://omninoggin.com/
This WordPress Plugin allows you to verify IP addresses of clients connecting to your blog against the Project Honey Pot database. This takes anti-spam one steo further and will help protect your blog against email harvesters and other malicous visitors as well as spambots. That is because http:BL WordPress Plugin will actually block any potentially harmful clients from accessing your blog, they will be denied entry.
No related posts.