1stebiz.biz - small business articles and small business tutorials - Part 2

6 Useful Wordpress Plugins to Prevent Spam

In starting your wordpress, there’s a great possibility to receive spams. Receiving comment spam when first starting a blog can gain such traffic that could be alarming for beginners. For this reasons we don’t have the access to prevent spammers to read our blogs. In just a minute your blog can be spammed by thousands of comments. This article introduces 6 proven useful plugins that is available in wordpress to help you fight and eradicate spam.

  • yaCAPTCHA
  • It is a CAPTCHA plugin designed for WordPress, it helps you block comment spam from automated bots. So if you post comments, users have to write down the characters of an image provided. It is planned for automated programs to find it hard figuring out those characters, a great help in preventing comment spam.

    These are the requirements to have yaCAPTCHA in your computers: WordPress 1.5 or above, PHP 4.0.6 or above with GD2 library support, Theme must support the ‘comment_form’ action.

  • Trackback Spam Resources
  • A very simple b ut effective test on all trackbacks in order to stop spam. The TrackBack Validator, a plugin for WordPress that are sent by people commenting on your weblog that go along by a URL that points to that commentary. Spam TrackBacks are accompanied by a URL that points to a pay-per-click affiliate website or other irrelevant material. The Validator exploits this key difference:

      1. When a TrackBack is received, the plugin retrieves the Web page located at the URL included in the TrackBack.
      2. If the page contains a link to your weblog, the TrackBack is approved.
      3. If the page does not link to your weblog, the TrackBack is flagged as spam and rejected.

    Because TrackBack spammers do not set up custom Web pages linking to the weblogs they attack, this simple test will quickly reveal illegitimate Trackbacks.

  • WP-SpamFree and Trackback Validator
  • A very powerful anti plugin for WordPress that eradicates comment spam, have a good performance in eliminating trackback and pingback spam. It works invisibly without CAPTCHA’s, or other inconvenience to site visitors. The plugin includes spam-free contact form feature as well.

      Features
      1. It’s completely free for both commercial and personal use.
      2. The beauty of this plugin is the methods of blocking spam. It takes a different approach than most and stops spam at the door.
      3. Powerful trackback and pingback spam protection.
      4. It works like a firewall to ensure that your commenters are in fact, human. Virtually eliminates comment spam from bots.
      5. It has a counter on your dashboard to keep track of all the spam it’s blocking. The numbers will show how effective this plugin is.
      6. Includes drop-in spam-free contact form. Easy to use ? no configuration necessary.
      7. No false positives, which leads to fewer frustrated readers, and less work for you.
      8. You won’t have to waste valuable time sifting through a spam queue anymore, because there won’t be much there, if anything.
      9. Easy to install ? truly plug and play. Just upload and activate.
      10. The code has an extremely low bandwidth overhead and won’t slow down your blog (very light database access), unlike some other anti-spam plugins.
      11. Completely compatible with all cache plugins, including WP Cache and WP Super Cache. Not all anti-spam plugins can say that.
      12. Display your blocked spam stats on your blog.
      13. Helps keep your database slimmer and more efficient.
      14. Works in WordPress MU as well.
  • Invisible Defender
  • wpsecurity1 This plugin specializes in protecting registration, login and comment forms from spambots by addin g two extra fields hidden by CSS. This approach gave me 100% anti-spam protection on one of my sites.

    The idea behind this plugin is simple: SPAMBOTs either fill every form field they find (generic spambots) or fill WordPress-specific fields only (spambots which will recognize WP or are targeting WP only). Therefore it is sufficient to add two extra text fields to form (one empty and one with predefined value), and check their values after the form is submitted. 1st field (empty one) will be filled by generic spambots, and 2nd one will not be filled by spambots targeting WP only. With these two simple checks probably all spambots can be easily detected, so WP can return error “403 Forbidden” for them.

    These two extra fields are hidden with CSS rule, so they will not be visible for most users. Only users with text-based browsers (and very old ones which not support CSS) will see them. Invisible Defender also shows number of blocked spammers in Dashboard, so you can see that it really works.

  • Akismet
  • Akismet is quite possibly the most important and useful plugin you will ever install. It has been developed by the actual team behind Wordpress, if that is not enough of a seal of of approval and a guarantee, I don’t know what is. In a nutshell, Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not and lets you review the spam it catches under your blog’s “Comments” admin screen.

      Requires WP2.0 or higher and is compatible up to WP 2.8.4.
  • Maximum Security for Wordpress
  • Maximum Security for Wordpress is packed with strong protection that makes your site extremely secure. It guards against intrusion; tracks a plethora of events; blocks malicious content that could harm your readers and your search engine ranking; and includes a strong Web application firewall along with a full blown intrusion prevention system, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. No other security plugin for Wordpress comes anywhere close to matching the powerful features of this tool.

    ————————
    Stace Zimmerman is an Internet Marketer who owns & maintains many websites online. Please visit http://themelib.com for wordpress themes and other blogging information. He also runs a hoodia information site at http://hoodiaandweightloss.com

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    Ten Ways to Use PHP on your Website

      PHP is an open source programming language

    PHP is a programming language that allows your website to go beyond a basic HTML document, and create an interactive experience. Open source means that the source code is available to someone with proper access to the site, so that they can easily make changes. When the Internet was first getting started, most of the pages on websites were basic HTML documents. Meaning that when you visited a page (about.html, for example), you downloaded all of the content of the page into your browser.

      How Do I Know if I have a PHP Site?

    If you are visiting a site, and you see that the page name ends with .html, this means that the page is most likely a plain old HTML page. If the page name ends in .php, then you the site is a php based site. Other dynamic programming languages include .jsp (Java Server Pages) or .asp (.NET or Active Server Pages). Occasionally you’ll see sites that end in .html that have dynamic code embedded in them, but this requires some tricks to accomplish on the server.

    We have several sites that use static HTML pages and have great results. There are some pages that have dynamic content, but most of the pages are built in straight HTML. It’s great for search engine optimization, as some of those pages have been active for years. However, as the number of pages grow, it becomes increasingly difficult to update menu or navigation items, because it means you have to open each page, one at a time, and modify the contents.

      Advantages of using PHP

    PHP works a little differently. Instead of downloading the entire page (with the navigation, content and everything in one file), php allows you to embed programming code that isn’t displayed to the end user. This programming code allows you to tell the page, “Insert the top navigation here.” Or, “put the content for the page over there.”

    PHP allows you to personalize a page, for example, or automatically detect that a user is coming into the site from a mobile device and display a different version of the site that is optimized for their Blackberry or iPhone. PHP keeps most of the code for the site “behind the scenes” so that the page that is displayed to the end user loads quickly and doesn’t require the browser to do processing work — the work is handled instead by the server.

      PHP Is Ideal For Working With Databases

    One of the biggest advantages of a programming language like PHP is that it allows you to easily interact with a database. If you’re unfamiliar with databases, think of a database as a souped-up form of an Excel spreadsheet. You have columns (i.e. page name, content, title) and rows. Rows typically would hold information that is organized by column headings.

    PHP makes it easy to read information from a database, and then display information onto a web page. So, if you’ve ever used a site where you type in your zip code to find a store location near you, the system likely is taking your zip code, performing a database query (i.e. find all stores within 10 miles of the 80303 zip code) and display the results so that you can find your way. In order to do this, we have a geolocation database that allows us to tell the approximate distance between two zip codes.

    You could do the same thing by building out a series of web pages that has each location. And while this is fine for three or four locations, as the number of locations increases, PHP allows you to automate the process.

      Keep Content Organized

    One of the ways we’ve been able to streamline the process of building websites is that we’ve standardized our process using our PageDirector content management system. There are many, many ways to build websites. Each designer seems to have a slightly different way of putting a site together. We are frequently asked to work on sites that other people have created, and in order to make simple changes to the content or navigation, we often have to dig around in the code to find where things are located. This takes time and isn’t very efficient. The PageDirector system, however, keeps all of the content for the site neatly organized in a database table. So that anyone can easily find the content and make changes quickly and easily. One of our clients said to me in an email to me yesterday, “It’s really efficient and a simple tool to use PageDirector. It makes my life easier being able to update the website fast.”

      How Does It Work?

    When someone clicks on a link to go to a page, the system pulls the right content from the database, grabs the menu items from another location, and on-the-fly creates the page for a person.

  • Summary
  • PHP is a server-based programming language that allows you to create an interactive experience for your site visitors, and keep content and other information organized within a database.

    Copyright © 2009 Chuck Matthews
    ————————
    PHP is a programming language that allows your website to go beyond a basic HTML document, and create an interactive experience. PHP allows you to create an interactive experience for your site visitors, and keep content and other information organized within a database. This article explores some of interactive applications that can be developed using PHP. http://www.customerparadigm.com/index/21/Articles_Media.php

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