How to stop spam on WordPress sites

A frequent problem of sites where visitors leave comments or feedback is spam. Even with a few visitors, it receives traffic from bots. Every year the percentage of automated traffic only increases. Spammers post comments with ads, links to malicious content, or to their websites to get backlinks. WordPress looks pretty secure, but site owners on this engine still periodically complain about spam.

Many CMS, including WordPress, have a standard spam comment filtering system. In the admin site on WordPress, you can configure stop words, according to which the system will identify spam and send a message to the blacklist. However, the standard system cannot cope with it, and the site starts advertising Viagra or something else. Therefore, if there are a lot of unnatural comments, install a WordPress spam plugin to get protection against spam, which bots and scammers cannot bypass.

Sometimes captcha saves from bots. An author of the comment will be forced to confirm that he or she is not a robot. Older versions of captcha can annoy people because users are too lazy to switch layouts and type characters. They do not want to spend time dragging pictures or selecting different images of trains.

Google is committed to ensuring that live users do not need to prove anything. Google recently announced the launch of reCAPTCHA3, which determines the quality of traffic by itself, observing the typical behavior of users. A captcha will ask to confirm that a person is commenting only if it notices suspicious behavior. Together with the captcha service, you should put the plugin in order not to miss natural spam comments on the site. For this reason, you should use CleanTalk plugin.

How to protect the website from spam

Extensive anti-spam checks annoy ordinary users and reduce the comfort of using your resource. Users are more willing to leave a review if they do not need to go through a long and tedious verification procedure. So when choosing a plugin, consider what methods it uses to verify the data to make the use of the site as comfortable as possible.

CleanTalk is a cloud-based protection system for limiting comment spam during registration, sending via contact forms, and creating trackbacks. In addition, the plugin also filters orders, widgets, and email newsletters. The plugin detects and stops spam using no captcha and other techniques. The procedure occurs by recognizing spam on the following grounds:

• comments of a user have previously been blacklisted;
• the comment contains a link that is in the blacklist;
• a request is made to enable javascript;
• a comment is posted too quickly as for a person

Also, CleanTalk plugin provides analytical information on its website, which you can read. Developers also state that the probability of a false positive for this filter is 0.001%.

The Yucatan Times for Yucatech

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