Your WordPress blog is your platform for sharing information about your passions, concerns, and hobbies. If you run a business, your WordPress site is your forum for displaying your goods and services, interacting with customers, and even making sales. Unfortunately, spammers can negatively impact your site in many ways.
They harass your followers, mess up your analytics, and hog your resources for their devious purposes. Fortunately, there are ways to stop spammers in their tracks by using one of the following anti spam WordPress plugins.
Customer Referral Spam Blocker
Not only does referral spam mess up your Google Analytics statistics, it also serves to help spam websites build up their search engine rankings. This makes these spam sites appear to be legitimate. Essentially, the referrer makes multiple requests to your site using a bogus referrer URL. This adds the spammer’s URL to your statistics, and also causes search engine spiders to index the spam site. This plugin blocks these and keeps them out of your analytics stats.
WPBruiser
There is no doubt that spambots are a problem for WordPress websites. Unfortunately, forcing users to enter in confusing and hard to read characters from captcha images is also problematic. This is why WPBruiser exists. It catches and blocks spambots from regisitering on your website or leaving comments, without forcing people to use captcha. Many other plugins only catch spammers after they’ve already registered. This means you have to do the real cleanup. WPBruiser gets them before they even get in the door. Another feature that many webmasters find attractive is that this solution doesn’t access any external databases. It is entirely self-contained.
CM E-Mail Registration Blacklist
This plugin prevents your WordPress site from spammers who are trying to register on your website. It checks users against databases of known spammers, and lists of blacklisted domains. If the user shows up on any of those lists, their attempt at registration fails.
SiteWide Comment Control
In most instances, when a spammer or troll decides to target the comments section, they tend to stick to a single website on your network. Handling this is easy. You simply lock the spammer out of the site. However, every so often, a spammer decides to make a special project out of an entire network, and they begin spamming all of your websites.
SiteWide Comment Control allowsw you to manage spammers over your entire network by blackholing their comments, sending them to a spam queue, or putting them on moderation. The last option is great for users who are new to your network and not yet vetted out.
For example, someone posting a list of best apps as their first post might be suspected as someone doing affiliate marketing for the makers of one of those apps, so you would keep them on moderation until you were sure they were a legitimate follower.
WP-Spamshield Anti Spam
This is plugin provides 2 layers of spam protection. First, it keeps the bots that are the source of most spam problems out of your WordPress site. Then, it also stops most human spammers from clogging your comments section with spam posts. Here’s the best part. All of this happens behind the scenes. This means that the users who are filling out your contact forms and commenting on your posts legitimately, won’t be harassed to prove that they are human.
ACT Stop Spam
This plugin uses the StopForumSpam.com database of blacklisted ip addresses to keep your website safe from spammers. If you have issues with incoming spam bots wasting your time and chewing up your bandwidth, this is a great plugin for keeping your WordPress website safe. This is a great tool that provides fundamental spam protection.
Akismet
The Akismet plugin uses the Akismet web service to verify whether or not comments submitted to your website are spam. If it flags something as spam, that comment is sent to a queue for you to either review and approve or delete permanently. Every comment that is left on your website is tagged with a status history.
This lets you know which comments Akismet approved, and which were flagged but later approved. When reviewing comments in the spam queue, you can see URLs to verify that they aren’t misleading. This plugin is free if you are operating a personal blog, but there is a subscription fee to use the API key if you have a commercial site.
IP-Geo Block
IP Geo Block performs many functions to keep your site safe and free of annoying spammers. First, it contains code that prevents your site from being impacted by the zero day exploit Then, it blocks IP addresses from outside of your country from accessing the admin portion of your website, commenting on your posts, or attempting to send login requests. There’s even a feature that allows you to block all IP addresses from specific countries.
Anti Splog
Most bloggers create their WordPress websites to share helpful, informative, or entertaining content with their followers. Legitimate commercial sites are created to sell products and services, but they have specific features that give proof that they are not bog spam sites.
For example, they contain legitimate contact information, and the content is relevant and useful. Splogs, on the other hand, are created not for the purpose of sharing content, but to simply link to affiliate websites.
The content is meaningless, repetitive, and often automatically generated with lots of keywords stuffed into it. Anti Splog protects legitimate bloggers by blocking spam bots from splogs from signing up on your site, and it helps you to determine which blogs are flagged as being highly likely to be splogs.
GraphComment Comment System
This plugin replaces your default comments session with a third party solution that facilitates both discussion and collaboration. Of course, part of encouraging users to engage in meaningful dialogue with you and other visitors is to catch and get rid of abusive comments and spam before they are posted.
GraphComment does a great job of this, leaving your comments section a safe place for legitimate users to discuss various issues with one another without harassment. Finally, because the comment moderation is done automatically, you spend less time dealing with moderation issues yourself.
WordPress Zero Spam
WordPress Zero Spam is another popular plugin to fight against the spams. It is based on a concept of Javascript given by Mozilla developer David Walsh. It is easy and simple to use. It does not require any additional API or settings for use. It uses javascript key validation for preventing the spams. It does not require any filling of captchas. It supports contact form 7 and Gravity Forms.
Anti Spam Bee
Bee is a nice plugin which helps to avoid the blog spams. It is a free WordPress plugin for personal as well as commercial use. This plugin validates the IP address of the commenter and avoids the spam comments. It creates a separate database of the spam comments which can be cleared after every few days. It tells you about a spam comment with the e-mail notification. It is an effective and easy to use tool to combat the spam comments.
WP-Spamshield Anti-Spam
It is a powerful anti-spam WordPress plugin. It is available for free usage. It validates the trackbacks and avoids the spam queue. It helps to eliminate the comment spams without using any captcha. It provides you with the spam free contact forms and avoids the registration spams.
It enables you with an effective spam protection with its spam blocking.
The first layer is Javascript/Cookies anti-spam layer and the second one is the Algorithmic layer.
Javascript/Cookies Anti-Spam Layer
This first layer works with the combination of Javascript and cookies to prevent the 100% automated spambots. It is algorithmically enhanced and utilizes the randomly generated keys to make sure that the spambots could not beat it.
Algorithmic Layer
The Algorithmic Anti-Spam Layer consists of a number of advanced filtersand eliminates the trackback spams and most of the human spams as well.
The most amazing benefit of it is that it does all that without restricting the legitimate comments, contact forms, and trackbacks.
Anti Spam WordPress Plugin
It blocks spam comments automatically. It is a great tool to stop the comment spams. It does not include any captcha or the moderation queue.It is very easy to use and starts working just after you install it.
Growmap Anti Spambot Plugin
It is another simple WordPress plugin that helps you to avoid the . It enables you with a client side generated checkbox to prevent your site from spams. It helps to stop almost 99% of the automated spam bots. You can set a maximum number of comments that a user can enter to avoid the comment floods. The checkbox has been checked before the comment submission to avoid the loss of any legitimate comment.
Nix Anti-Spam Light
Nix Anti-Spam Light is a great plugin. Using this plugin the comment spammers can be kept away. It is easy to use and uses Javascript to protect your site from the spam bots.
WangGuard
WangGuard provides you the advanced protection against the spammers. It is WordPrees MU, BuddyPress and bbPress compatible. It is a cloud based plugin and requires an API key for installation. It is loaded with amazing spam validators and also puts a strong protection layer in the registration section.
AntiSpam By Clean Talk
It is a premium anti-spam plugin. It stops the comment spams, registration , contact email spams, subscription and much more. It easily filters the spam bots. It is compatible with WooCommerce and filter the spam registrations and spam reviews for woo commerce. It is also compatible with wordPress cache plugins. It is a very high rated plugin on wordpress.org because of its amazing features.
Stop Spam Comments
It is a very spam prevention WordPress plugin. This plugin also works on the Javascript based method to prevent the spam comments. It does not add any script files or any additional database queries which ensure a smooth performance of your site.
Whether spam is currently an issue for your personal or eCommerce WordPress site, or you simply want to prevent it from becoming an issue in the future, give a few of these plugins a try. You’ll be much happier once spammers no longer create headaches for you or your followers.
This article is contributed by Kerry Creaswood and Mary Scott.
Kerry Creaswood is a young and ambitious writer from Savannah, GA. She is fond of various forms of art and thinks that everything we can imagine is real. To find more about Kerry – check her Twitter and blog.
Mary Scott is a WordPress expert, associated with Stellen Infotech and has a lot of experience in providing Plugin Development in WordPress. She has delivered numerous range of quality products related to this. She has a strong passion for writing useful and insights about WordPress tips and tricks.
