Using WordPress to Easily Fight Spam and Bots

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It’s WordPress Wednesday!

How to use WordPress features and a few others to easily fight spam and bots!

Take a few moments to protect you and your visitors from spam and bots!

There is nothing worse then working hard on blogging, SEO or simply building your website and your brand, only to have your first comments and inquiries be from “bots”. Bots are automated visitors that spam your comment boxes in order to farm for email addreses, leave links to their website and sometimes to place dangerous spyware on your website.

WordPress makes it very easy to stop these spammers dead in their tracks. We will cover three simple techniques to make your website spam proof and keep your comment section clean.

1. Captcha Plugins. I’m sure everyone has seen “Captchas”. A Captcha is a human verification form which asks the visitor to read an image and type the letters and/or numbers into a form box. Only humans can read the image, which makes it impossible for bots to complete the form.
   1. Here are several captcha plugins:
      1. http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/simple-captcha/
      2. http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-captcha-free/
      3. http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/si-captcha-for-wordpress/
2. Email Images. The best way to have your email spammed is to place your email in text on a contact page or anywhere else on your website. A good practice is to either spell our your email addresses (gilbert AT wpchemist DOT com) instead of (gilbert@wpchemist.com). As of now, bots cannot read email addresses when typed out.
   1. Another option is to use paint to type your email address and then save it as an image. Notice the following email address is actually an image and not text. Bots cannot read an image.
3. Form Box. Another alternative to email addresses is a form submission box. Depending on the form box you are using, you can alter it and rename all of the fields.
   1. SurveyMonkey.com is a great way to not only control spam, but to automate email campaigns for those who fill out your forms. It’s free and you can create as many forms as you want. Here is a great example of form box http://productivityjunkies.com/products/how-to-self-host-using-wordpress-org/
   2. The WordPress Plugin “Contact Form 7” http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/contact-form-7/ is an easier alternative to surveymonkey, but it doesn’t have email campaigns.

There are a lot of ways to protect yourself from spam and bots, but whatever you do, just choose something.

Once spam has gotten out of control and your email address has been sent all over the internet, there it is typically too late.

If you have any questions, and would like further instruction, simply: