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Understanding and Combating Spam in WordPress
This guide details possible actions to combat unwanted content that can appear on your WordPress site when it is not sufficiently protected.
The importance of protecting yourself
When your WordPress site is not sufficiently protected or monitored, spambots take advantage of this to use the comment system and post thousands of messages (obviously containing links to their dubious activities).
Any form (contact, voting, reservation, etc.) can also be exploited for malicious activities if nothing is done upstream to guard against this.
This will affect your site (no one will post a serious comment), the reputation of the domain name, your activities and the server itself to the point of saturating it and impacting other sites on the same space.
It is therefore essential to take care of the health of your site and to ensure that it functions properly throughout its life.
Fight spam comments
We recommend that you first carefully follow the solutions offered by the WordPress codex . You will learn that disabling the comment system via the WordPress dashboard only affects future articles ; it is therefore important to follow one of the alternative methods offered by WordPress for a more radical deactivation.
If you still want to collect comments, you can for example limit them to registered users (read the official help about the comments settings page) but you will then have to monitor registrations.
Fight sending spam
An effective protection against robotic comments and the exploitation of any form on your site consists in implementing a captcha, or its alternative the honeypot (pot of honey). This will close the door to bots (robots programmed to browse the Web and exploit its vulnerabilities).
Akismet , developed by Automattic company behind WordPress, collects good reviews but becomes paid for commercial use.
By installing WordPress on your Infomaniak site via our WordPress & Apps system, you will find the WP Armor – Honeypot Anti Spam extension already activated, in order to protect all types of forms, in its free version, those of WP Comments, WP Registration, BBPress Forum, Contact Form 7, Gravity Forms, Elementor Forms, Divi Theme Contact Form, WooCommerce Reviews Pro, etc.
If you want a dedicated-only alternative to the ContactForm 7 contact form , we recommend adding its protective Honeypot extension .
Another extension is getting a lot of positive reviews: The Antispam Sentinel
The role of the host
You can learn more about the control mechanisms put in place by Infomaniak thanks to our blog article and the FAQ about the tools made available if you have a website.