WordPress Hosting Anti-Spam Plug-ins
August 14th, 2007 by Keith from shrewdies | Filed under Old Web Business Posts, Phase 1, WordPress Hosting.Invest a few seconds now to protect your blog from spam, and you will save thousands in future, not to mention protecting your reputation.
Most spam is automatically generated, and you can automatically stop it with WordPress hosting anti-spam plug-ins. A small amount, typically human generated, might creep through. But if you protect yourself against the worst excesses – leaving you time to edit or filter the odd bad comment.
More importantly, it leaves you free to interact with your genuine visitors.
Most importantly, it stops new visitors from ever seeing the, often offensive spam, leaving your reputation intact.
I prefer the belt and braces approach, and activate 3 plug-ins that help in different ways.
Akismet Plug-In
Akismet spam filter is packaged with standard WordPress. It uses a central database that all users contribute to. When you flag a comment as spam, Akismet keeps a record of this, and warns users throughout the world. You need to sign-up with WordPress.com to get a key. This only takes a few seconds, and once you have the key, you can, and should, use it on all your sites. WordPress.com is also useful for another reason, and I will talk about my free WordPress.com website(s) later.
Bad Behavior Plug-In
This WordPress hosting anti-spam plug-in monitors visitors behavior and, if it recognizes typical bad robot type spamming patterns, it blocks the site. Bad Behavior is very straightforward to use, but there must be lots going on under the hood. Great way to stop spam before it starts.
Spam Karma Plug-In
The Spam Karma plug-in has loads of options, but is usually perfectly OK without changing the defaults. You need to go to the Options page after activating to initialize the plug-in. It also makes sense to run the compatibility tests at the foot of the options page, now and whenever you change theme.
aLinks Plug-In
Not a spam plug-in, but it makes managing external links so easy, that I would not have wanted to write this without it. All you do is add regularly linked URL’s to the database, linked to a key phrase, and whenever you type that phrase in a post, aLinks automatically presents it as a link. Loads of options. Loads of extra features. I’ll probably write a full review of it later.
There are more plug-ins to activate and configure, but categories need sorting out before we do any more posts, and we need a contact page.
Tags: alinks, Bad-Behavior, Spam-Karma