Word Press is one of the most popular blogging platforms available for websites on the Internet today. It is popular because of its ease of installation, ease of use and the ability to customize options. Most sites that use it especially sites that are using blogging to earn revenue either because it is a business site or a personal site generating AdSense revenue want to ensure positive SEO or search engine optimization. In order to do this site owners encourage users to stay on their site as long as possible and to be interactive. This often means users are encouraged to contribute to posts of their own and comment on existing posts.
In order to encourage this, most site owners try to make it as easy as possible for users to be interactive. Sometimes this means not requiring users to register and allowing them to remain anonymous while they are posting. This is a great way to increase SEO but it also often lends itself to easy spamming as well. Off topic posts, user generated spam and automated bots exploiting Word Press are often the result. Fortunately, WordPress has several tools available to assist with spam blocking. The top 10 are:
- Simple Captcha: This plugin adds a captcha to your comments. A captcha is a mixture of words, images or numbers that are slightly distoreted and not easily readable by bots but easily discernable by people. When an automated bot tries to make a comment it identifies the post as needing a captcha before submitting. This fools the bot and dissuades it from posting.
- WP-Spam Hitman: This plugin uses a hit point system to identify and isolate spam posts. The way hit points work is that patterns are identified that point to the probability of the post being spam. This is a powerful way to eliminate or reduce spam on your blog. You can set it to automatically delete detected spam posts, identify it as spam or automatically put questionable posts into moderation.
- Spam Karma: This second iteration of the popular plugin is no longer in development but still is a powerful tool to use for WordPress sites in preventing spam. The code is updated and works well currently. It uses a similar set of analytics as WP-Spam Hitman and is also able to prevent pingback spam.
- Automattic Kismet or Akismet: This plugin specifically combats comment spam for bloggers who allow users to post comments from posts. It is available as a bundled plugin when you use WordPress and all you need is to request an API key for its use. It will identify and eliminate comment spam for your blog and works effectively.
- Bad Behavior: This is a tool that can be used on any PHP site to prevent spam so if you run WordPress but also have other PHP functions this is a great all inclusive tool. It provides an extra layer of security for your whole site preventing cracking as well as email harvesting. This is not a WordPress plugin but a separate tool that runs independently. However, it is compatible with WordPress and works well.
- Simple Trackback Validation: This plugin verifies trackbacks to determine if they are bot driven and spam. It does this by verifying the IP and host machine match and verifying the URL to ensure the post link is contained. If neither of the two conditions are met it is deemed spam and not allowed. You can set options on how you want the identified spam handled and you can even log the issues to see where spam is coming from and how frequently it occurs.
- Defensio: This is a service that checks for and filters spam from your blog. It is compatible with WordPress and has a proven track record. Spam is quarantined for review so you can check through it to make sure no false positives occurred. If a legitimate post is accidentally caught you can manually release it. Otherwise the spam is deleted.
- WordPress has built in tools that can help you maintain spam. The WordPress comment spam codex (http://codex.wordpress.org/Comment_Spam) recommends monitoring your comments and using the moderation settings that are readily available in your admin panel.
- Math Comment Spam Protection: This is a fun way to prevent bots from posting to your site by requiring any posters to answer a simple math equation before the post will submit. It will prevent bots from auto posting spam but it may also remove real life humans who can not add single digit numbers together.
- Dashboard: Latest Spam (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/dashboard-latest-spam/) – This plugin will allow you to easily monitor spam so you can go through it to ensure no legitimate posts got through. It creates a widget on your dashboard listing all the identified spam so you can manually approve any false positives.
