How Do You Deal With Spam?

Greetings to all!

I'm curious to know your ways of avoiding those wretched spam bots! Have you had the misfortune of being over run with them? Share with us your experience, and what you had done, or what your doing to combat it. Tell us the tips and tricks to keeping our websites clean of pesky varmints, and critters!

I'm hoping this thread will help others figure out the best ways to avoid having problem or at least be able cope with it a bit better.

I'll start it off by explaining what I do to avoid spam.

I make sure I:

Activate my Akismet plug-in, as it provides a protective shield over my sites.

Moderate my comments myself, and check them ofter. THIS is important, as you want to make sure the comments are spam, but checking them often ensures the search engine bots won't crawl the text either.

Have a captchacode for my subscriber form on your website, and have them verify their subscription through email.

I haven't been over run by spam yet, and I hope to avoid it. How about you? What are you doing currently? What have you done in the past? Tell us your stories about SPAM!

I'm also curious a bit about which platform are you mentioning? wordpress, joomla or custom website design?

I like Captcha code for my forms but best way is having security questions to allow post comment or submit content on my form.

what do you think about CAPTCHA verification code when today it could be bypassed by super spam programs ?

KellyLC said:

I'm also curious a bit about which platform are you mentioning? wordpress, joomla or custom website design?

Click to expand...

I, myself only have experience with WordPress, HTML and some PHP. My knowledge goes only so far, but I hope to expand upon it more and more.

KellyLC said:

What do you think about CAPTCHA verification code when today it could be bypassed by super spam programs ?

Click to expand...

Eek!!! The sound of that scares me! The captcha codes I have seen recently are so elaborate. They have to be, because of the `Super Spam`.

lol When I say Super Spam, it makes me think of little tiny bots with capes...lol

Akismet plug-in, is the best way to deal with it

Akismet plugin should be best way to fight against spam, and configure the Comment settings in Wordpress, dont let Guests leavin comments, and ofcourse try to use recaptcha.

Installing captcha be using Akismet or BadBehavior plugins should be effective in preventing spam.

If you know some php check out "botscout." They offer an API service where you can check your user's submitted form data against a huge blacklist of known bots/spammers. It's not perfect, but it does do quite a good job. I'd say it probably gets like 90% to 95% of the spam posts.

I thought that this thread was intended to discuss how to fight spam as a whole, but it seems that the OP is only speaking in regards to Wordpress. There are many plugins that will help with preventing spam, however, a properly maintained server with Mod_Security rules will help further as well. Web spam is a very easy thing to fight, you just need to not take any shortcuts when putting together your website. Email spam however, is something that needs to be discussed and faught.

I don't know if you face this, but if you do use Askimet for about one year, you will need to PAY?

It came to me after one year, so I change to anti-spam Bee. Works just as well.

I am agreeing with many of you guys: Akismet plugin is really good. But it also depends on the platform I am using.
However it also depends on what you mean in terms of "spam bot". The one flooding your comment fields? They are using scrapers which automatically picks up your site by searching for foot prints related to your platform. Like wordpress, vBulletin or whatever leaves the footprint "Powered by Wordpress/vBulletin" and therefore these platforms are often flooded by spammers. Therefore I use a plugin to hide your platform. You can read about it here.

And well.. Captcha ofcourse. But you know that there are indians working for $2/h just constantly solving captchas?