Bye! Captcha
My previous 2 blogs were about CAPTCHA and its new cousin reCAPTCHA. If you have not heard of the latter, that's ok, for it is kind of too sophisticated for me to understand. Typically, it's Google stuff.
CAPTCHA has been the default must-have "Comment" anti-spam taught in Wealthy Affiliate. If you are a newbie, no worries, you will be taught using something just as effective to block all unwelcome comments on your blog, without the need for CAPTCHA.
If CAPTCHA means CATCHUP to you now, please do a quick catch up by clicking here: https://my.wealthyaffiliate.com/fred-chong/blog/my...
Now, let's zoom into your WordPress's "Installed Plugins", if you are more than a year old here at WA, you most probably have installed both AKISMET and SI CAPTCHA Anti-Spam Plugins. They are close comrades guarding your blog or web page comments. You need them if you don't want to see spam messages appearing and messing up your comments.
Both the above Plugins are history now in WA, all newbies will no longer need to worry about installing any comment spam plugin (how nice!), the SiteRubix platform automatically takes care of this for you.
Now what we old buddies need to worry about?
Not much really, there are 2 steps:
Step 1: Install and activate WP-Spamshield Plugin here
https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-spamshield/ ;
Step 2: Deactivate both your AKISMET and SI CAPTCHA Anti-Spam Plugins.
Monitor your comment spams for a week or two, if you can read a number of spams blocked by WP-SpamShield (as shown below), the Plugin is doing its fine job alone.
Next you can reduce your Plugin overhead by deleting both the AKISMET and SI CAPTCHA Anti-Spam Plugins. Your web pages will likely be loading faster than before.
Hope the above is helpful!
Recent Comments
10
Thanks Fred, I was having a horrible time with SI CAP. It did not render correctly on my site, an dif it was not working well in addition then why keep it.
aventi!!
carl
That is good to know I have been using anit spam bee , so does have wp spamshield have this recaptcha in it
Great info. I have been using the WP-Spamshield but neglected to delete the captcha plugin. I appreciate you pointing that out it was a reminder to check my plugins and clean them up.
Hi Fred, enjoying your series, very helpful and actionable information. Thank you for sharing.
Alexander
Hi Erica, Don't rush to delete it immediately, please be advised to follow my 2 Steps :) Cheers!
Thanks. I still have SI CAPTCHA installed and I am going to go and delete it now as WP-Spamshield seems to be doing a good job.
Thanks for the heads up, Fred.
Kyle himself mentions here on his reply that Spamshield is enough. Do you need captcha or is wp-spamshield enough? This is music to my ears!