Well it’s finally happened. The spam bots have found this site and are being thoroughly repelled and I thought I’d take a moment to discuss security, spam robots and WordPress.
Akismet
One of the best methods of catching comment spam is through the plugin Akismet. Akismet is installed with every WordPress installation and simply requires a key (which is free) to activate. You can get an Akismet API key here. Akismet checks each comment made against it’s own database. Its database gets smarter every day as users all over the world let it know what is spam (rare) and what isn’t. Spam comments rarely get through and since it started being bundled with WordPress I can’t recall a single instance when I’ve seen a spam comment get through, it’s that effective.
Contact Form 7
The nicest form plugin I’ve found is Contact Form 7 (available via your dashboard). It has a few extra add-ons such as The Campaign Monitor Addon which makes managing email campaign lists and collecting subscribers a breeze. Once the bots find your site it’s time to tighten up your form security. Contact Form 7 provides two different fields to stop bots. One is a CAPTCHA field, the other is a quiz field. Both of these work in different ways.
CAPTCHA
You’ve probably seen these around the web and have been frustrated at their complexity. They drive almost everyone to distraction and there are many articles documenting the hardest to read CAPTCHAs around the world. Luckily Contact Form 7s CAPTCHA isn’t nearly as difficult as those but it can still frustrate your users as well as exclude visually impaired people.
Quiz
This field asks a simple question. You can set the questions yourself and they display randomly on the form so that bots find it difficult to get the form submitted. This is my personal favourite and I use it here on the quote form as well as the contact form.
Updating
One of the best things you can do to beat back the robots is to keep your WordPress and plugins up-to-date. Robots can exploit software holes, luckily the WordPress community is quick to find the holes and patch them up. You get no benefit if your version is out of date and may become a target for the latest bug exploitation. Crafty Coding Blog Packages come with a Maintenance Package for a year which means you won’t have to worry about updating your software and you can concentrate on your own work.
In Conclusion
There are many other methods of combating spam, these are just a few tried and tested simple methods that stop the vast majority of spammers from taking advantage of your site. Crafty Coding customers automatically have these methods installed and are able to blog/ignore their site without worrying.
