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6 Useful Wordpress Plugins to Prevent Spam

By Stacey Zimmerman

Republish: EasyPublish™ Published: 30Nov2009 Word count: 910 Viewed: 994 time(s) Get Free Content For Your Site

In starting your wordpress, there's a great possibility to receive spams. Receiving comment spam when first starting a blog can gain such traffic that could be alarming for beginners. For this reasons we don't have the access to prevent spammers to read our blogs. In just a minute your blog can be spammed by thousands of comments. This article introduces 6 proven useful plugins that is available in wordpress to help you fight and eradicate spam.

yaCAPTCHA

It is a CAPTCHA plugin designed for WordPress, it helps you block comment spam from automated bots. So if you post comments, users have to write down the characters of an image provided. It is planned for automated programs to find it hard figuring out those characters, a great help in preventing comment spam.

These are the requirements to have yaCAPTCHA in your computers: WordPress 1.5 or above, PHP 4.0.6 or above with GD2 library support, Theme must support the 'comment_form' action.

Trackback Spam Resources

A very simple b ut effective test on all trackbacks in order to stop spam. The TrackBack Validator, a plugin for WordPress that are sent by people commenting on your weblog that go along by a URL that points to that commentary. Spam TrackBacks are accompanied by a URL that points to a pay-per-click affiliate website or other irrelevant material. The Validator exploits this key difference:

1. When a TrackBack is received, the plugin retrieves the Web page located at the URL included in the TrackBack.

2. If the page contains a link to your weblog, the TrackBack is approved.

3. If the page does not link to your weblog, the TrackBack is flagged as spam and rejected.

Because TrackBack spammers do not set up custom Web pages linking to the weblogs they attack, this simple test will quickly reveal illegitimate Trackbacks.

WP-SpamFree and Trackback Validator

A very powerful anti plugin for WordPress that eradicates comment spam, have a good performance in eliminating trackback and pingback spam. It works invisibly without CAPTCHA's, or other inconvenience to site visitors. The plugin includes spam-free contact form feature as well.

Features

1. It's completely free for both commercial and personal use.

2. The beauty of this plugin is the methods of blocking spam. It takes a different approach than most and stops spam at the door.

3. Powerful trackback and pingback spam protection.

4. It works like a firewall to ensure that your commenters are in fact, human. Virtually eliminates comment spam from bots.

5. It has a counter on your dashboard to keep track of all the spam it's blocking. The numbers will show how effective this plugin is.

6. Includes drop-in spam-free contact form. Easy to use ? no configuration necessary.

7. No false positives, which leads to fewer frustrated readers, and less work for you.

8. You won't have to waste valuable time sifting through a spam queue anymore, because there won't be much there, if anything.

9. Easy to install ? truly plug and play. Just upload and activate.

10. The code has an extremely low bandwidth overhead and won't slow down your blog (very light database access), unlike some other anti-spam plugins.

11. Completely compatible with all cache plugins, including WP Cache and WP Super Cache. Not all anti-spam plugins can say that.

12. Display your blocked spam stats on your blog.

13. Helps keep your database slimmer and more efficient.

14. Works in WordPress MU as well.

Invisible Defender

wpsecurity1This plugin specializes in protecting registration, login and comment forms from spambots by addin g two extra fields hidden by CSS. This approach gave me 100% anti-spam protection on one of my sites.

The idea behind this plugin is simple: SPAMBOTs either fill every form field they find (generic spambots) or fill WordPress-specific fields only (spambots which will recognise WP or are targeting WP only). Therefore it is sufficient to add two extra text fields to form (one empty and one with predefined value), and check their values after the form is submitted. 1st field (empty one) will be filled by generic spambots, and 2nd one will not be filled by spambots targeting WP only. With these two simple checks probably all spambots can be easily detected, so WP can return error "403 Forbidden" for them.

These two extra fields are hidden with CSS rule, so they will not be visible for most users. Only users with text-based browsers (and very old ones which not support CSS) will see them. Invisible Defender also shows number of blocked spammers in Dashboard, so you can see that it really works.

Akismet

Akismet is quite possibly the most important and useful plugin you will ever install. It has been developed by the actual team behind Wordpress, if that is not enough of a seal of of approval and a guarantee, I don't know what is. In a nutshell, Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not and lets you review the spam it catches under your blog's "Comments" admin screen.

Requires WP2.0 or higher and is compatible up to WP 2.8.4.

Maximum Security for Wordpress

Maximum Security for Wordpress is packed with strong protection that makes your site extremely secure. It guards against intrusion; tracks a plethora of events; blocks malicious content that could harm your readers and your search engine ranking; and includes a strong Web application firewall along with a full blown intrusion prevention system, and that's just the tip of the iceberg. No other security plugin for Wordpress comes anywhere close to matching the powerful features of this tool.

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