WordPress Hint for the Day: A simple way to foil the Spam Bots!
Foil the Spam!
If you are lucky enough(!) to administer a blog you will doubtless have already come across blog spam. In the early days of a blog its not really a big deal but as your blog ages you will quickly find that you will be attracting 100′s of comments a day a very high percentage of which is likely to be spam. Much of this is auto-generated by software simply trying to post comments for the purpose of obtaining links or traffic.
The problem with this auto-generated spam is that its usually very generic, completely unrelated and so less than desirable for any blog owner to publish on his or her site.
There are several ways to combat blog spam but a very simple, free and effective way to foil the bulk of these auto generated comments is to simply to install a Captcha on your blog. You will already have seen these simple ‘human checker’ tools which require you to enter a sequence of letters or words from an image. Because computers can’t read the letters but humans can, its a simple but very effective way of making sure the only comments you get are actually posted by humans!
In practice, I run quite a number of blogs and can vouch for its effectiveness. And… its FREE!! You can see how it works by trying to comment on my blog here. If you enter an incorrect Captcha code it knocks you back. Simple but effective!
reCaptcha takes things a little further by mixing in non-dictionary recognised words and further distortion of the image to make it virtually impossible for even the best image recognition software to crack.
Installation for WordPress is quite simple:-
If you don’t have a Google account, sign up for one as the reCAPTCHA technology was recently aquired by Google…
- Log in to your Google account
- Go here to sign up for the reCAPTCHA API keys
- Add your domain name and get your public and private API keys
- Meanwhile, grab the WP-reCAPTCHA plugin from the WordPress site here
- Unzip it and upload the WP-reCAPTCHA folder to your WordPress plugins f0lder
- Login to your WordPress admin panel and find and activate WP-reCAPTCHA under the Plugins menu option
- Click the link that appears to go to the WP-reCAPTCHA options
- Copy and paste in your public and private API keys that Google have provided you with from step 3 above
- Set any other options for the plugin as you wish
Your done!
Blog Spam Amusement!
In the course of my day I cast my eye over streams of various blog comments so its always amusing to see something just a little different from the usual humdrum of auto-generated rubbish that I see day-after-day on some of the blogs I look after.
This one caught my eye and really did give me a really good laugh:-
“I’m currently being held prisoner by the Russian mafia and being forced to post spam comments on blogs and forum! If you don’t approve this they will kill me. They’re coming back now. Please send help!”
Top marks for originality! 
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Tags: blog commenting, Blogging, spam
