Hello everyone!
I hope you are well 🙂 I am taking the trouble to write this post in order to propose my ideal combo for fight against spam on WordPress and BuddyPress.
Indeed, spam is one of the scourges of the web, and particularly in the WordPress world. Between the cascade of spammer registrations and the abundance of unwanted comments, it's easy to go crazy.
This is particularly true in the case of social networks under BuddyPress. As long as you want something modern, where the Internet user can register and start using your social network without waiting for your approval, your site quickly risks being invaded by spammers.
Unfortunately, there is no miracle solution, but I will show you which extensions I use simultaneously to limit caseability. If you have other ideas or extensions to suggest, don’t hesitate to comment… in the comments 🙂
The basics: install Akismet
Akismet is the base of the base. This is the most popular anti-spam plugin, and once activated, it will allow you to automatically spam all spammer comments.
The plugin is free for non-commercial sites. On the other hand, it becomes paying for for-profit sites. As such, Akismet has already removed API access to some of my sites because there were advertisements on these sites. In this case, what I advise you is to checkout, because this plugin is one of the most effective to avoid being overwhelmed with spam in the comments.
Plus, it's natively integrated with other popular plugins like Gravity Forms, Jetpack, and Contact Form 7.
Blacklist Updater: the in-house anti-spam to pair with the big guys
The concept of Blacklist Updater is completely different from other anti-spam plugins. This plugin actually allows you to update the famous blacklist of comments that can be filled manually in the WordPress “Discussions” settings page: wp-admin/options-discussion.php
So, instead of filling this blacklist yourself with your own ideas of banned words, the Blacklist Updater plugin takes care of everything by automatically filling in all the known and less known terms that it is better to blacklist because they are often used by spammers.
It is a plugin to pair with automatic and traditional antispams like Akismet.
Stop Spammers: the ultimate anti-spam layer
Stop Spammer monitors and records both IP, email and user ID. He turns to StopForumSpam, Honeypot, Akismet and BotScout to cross-check information.
Stop Spammer also identifies anomalies such as disposable email addresses or the absence of an HTTP ACCEPT header. In addition, Stop Spammer is able to refuse post-form data that is missing an HTTP REFERER header, a mistake that spammers regularly make.
On one of my sites running BuddyPress, Stop Spammers completely fixed the problem of spammer registrations. Before, with Akismet alone, I had at least 20 spammer registrations every day, and each one sent around 30 messages to the other members of my network. I'll let you imagine the disastrous consequences.
Since I installed Stop Spammers, I have at most one or two spammers per week. To be combined with Akismet.
Google reCaptcha
Another plugin to pair with the others. This is Google reCaptcha. Some themes offer it natively for all registration and comment forms, otherwise, you just need to download a WordPress extension, and create an API key directly with Google.
Google reCaptcha V2 will allow you to display a small “I am not a robot” wherever necessary. With version V3, you avoid classic anti-spam, and the protection system becomes invisible to the user.
WPS Hide Login
WPS Hide Login allows you to modify the URL of your login and registration page, so that only your bloggers know how to log in to your site, but not spammers. So you change /wp-login.php to the URL of your choice, and that’s it.
This will provide an extra layer of protection against spammers. In addition, the extension was developed by the French from the excellent WP Server, which I had listed in the best hosts for WordPress !
Plugins for manual acceptance of new registrants
If you really want to avoid any fraudulent registrations on your site, especially on a social network under BuddyPress, I advise you to manually validate each registration.
WP Approve User
This very basic plugin allows you to validate or reject registrations under WordPress.
BuddyPress Registration Options
This plugin, more advanced than the previous one, is adapted for BuddyPress.
Other known anti-spam extensions
For my part, I use the combo of extensions that I listed above on each blog. If you want to test other anti-spam solutions, here are the best known ones. Please note, some replace Akismet, and offer very advanced and paid features.
And you, what solutions have you found against spam? Don’t hesitate to share them in the comments!
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