SPAM anyone?
30 Apr
One of the most annoying things in the world today is SPAM. It’s those useless messages that pedal the latest and greatest in Chinese herbal cures, Viagra and countless other products. Recently I decided to add a plug-in to deal with the amount of SPAM that SpicyWebDesigners.com sees on a daily basis. When you see a few hundred pieces of SPAM coming into through your website the first thing that people do is try to sift through the messages, deleting the spam and keeping the real comments from actual people. This is pretty time consuming and if you want to spend time creating value on your website when you work on it then deleting SPAM is very costly. Just like when SPAM comes into your email inbox there are ways to flag messages on your website automatically where you don’t need to be there moderating the comments coming in. After all, you have better things to do with your time. Right?
I personally use WordPress to run SpicyWebDesigners.com so these solutions focus around WordPress plugins primarily to help you save time with your SPAM troubles.
Akismet – This is the grandfather of SPAM plug-ins and in the world of WordPress you can use it to blast away your SPAM. To many people it does just one thing… it works! This plug-in is perfect for those that want to plug it into their website and forget about it.
WP-SpamFree – This is another great SPAM plug-in. It allows you the ability to blacklist certain SPAMMERS, Disabling Pings and Trackbacks, allowing or disallowing SPAMMERS hiding behind proxies to comment on your website and it also allows you to apply spam settings to contact forms on your website.
You can really lock down most inputs that are open and prone to SPAM with WP_SpamFree and track your website’s spam stats and display them on your website as well. If you are a beginner then this plug-in might go a bit over your head or require some further learning on your part simply because you can configure everything in this plug-in
Are you human?
The major problem with spam is that you cannot tell who is human and who’s a robot, spider or crawler simply by looking at the comment or message being sent sometimes. The invention of CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) in online forms, subscription pages and other input-based web pages has largely helped distinguish person from robot. CAPTCHA works as a “Challenge Response” test which challenges a visitor showing up to your web page to enter a response which is then validated against the displayed challenge. Challenges are based on a few characteristics including…
- Most humans can easily solve the challenge given
- Most software cannot accurate answer a CAPTCHA challenge making it difficult to SPAM
- It doesn’t rely on a type of CAPTCHA being new to the attacker
If you’ve ever entered a response to a graphic image, an obvious question like “Is fire hot?” or “what color is a fire truck?“ or a math problem then you’ve used CAPTCHA, probably without knowing it. WordPress has a number of CAPTCHA based plug-ins that depending on what you want are available.
Peter’s Math Anti-Spam Plug-in – This plug-in uses CAPTCHA and math to challenge visitors on your website to respond and answer a simple math question like “What is 2 + 3?” when they comment on your website. It certainly keeps the “spambots” away but it won’t stop human spammers from answering those simple math questions when they comment on your site.
There are so many plugins out there to help you control your spam but try to stick to widely used and commonly updated plugins because they will provide you a better an established way to protect your website from spamming and the ability to update the plug-in on a regular basis.
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