Or how to not get naked in public
There are many potential spam magnets on a WordPress website, but two generate most of the spam.
Are your website email addresses getting spammed into submission?
If they are it’s likely you have naked email addresses on the site, plain text email addresses that can be and will be scrapped by spammers.
Are you receiving spam emails from your contact form?
Chances are you aren’t using Captcha, probably because it’s so ugly, and not very consumer friendly.
There are some simple solutions.
Naked Email Addresses
The easiest solution is to not put plain text email addresses into content. But easy isn’t always feasible. There are a number of plugins available that help with this. Most use short codes that you need to remember to use when you add an email address. We all know how effective that will be. We recommend the Email Address Encoder plugin.
A lightweight plugin to protect plain email addresses and mailto links from email-harvesting robots by encoding them into decimal and hexadecimal entities. Has effect on the posts, pages, comments, excerpts and text widgets. No UI, no shortcode, no JavaScript — just simple spam protection.
Stopping Spam Comments
Captcha has been around for a while, ugly, hard to use, but effective. Google recently entered into this with reCAPTCH, a more attractive and easier to use solution. If you are using Gravity Forms, and why wouldn’t you be, it’s easy to add reCAPTCH to your contact forms:
- Go to Google reCAPTCHA and select the Get reCAPTCHA button to register your site
- Add the Site Key and the Secret Key to Gravity Forms in Forms > Settings
- Using Red8’s Tracking Scripts Manager, add the script to the head
- Add the form tag to the form using the HTML option in the GF Form Builder
And in four simple steps you have installed the Google reCAPTCHA API in your contact form.
Eliminate naked email addresses and comment spam, and while you won’t solve all your spam problems, the two most common spam magnets will be demagnetized.
Author: James Hipkin
CEO, Managing Director
James brings over 30 years of professional sales, marketing, and marketing consultation services to the table. Serving global brands along with small businesses, Hipkin leads a highly-skilled team of full-time developers, producers, and project managers who are committed to your success.
An excellent communicator and inventive problem-solver, his creative vision and bottom-line sensibility have proven successful at building productive, long-term partnerships with both employees and clients.