Spam Busters!

This is a very quick post, of only 278 words about a potentially useful plugin for your WordPress site. It'll take you just a couple of minutes to read!

Over time, I've seen many people asking about how to reduce spam from comments and contact forms. The thing is that we can't stop humans from manually wasting their "oh so valuable" time to create spam and if we block their email or IP address they often simply use another one. But about 90% of spam comes from auto bots, in my case through my contact form.

A few days ago I got around to looking for a solution and found "WP Armour".

The way "WP Armour" works is that it adds an extra, hidden field to forms it finds on your site. The hidden field, surprise surprise, can't be seen by humans however, it is detected by the bots which then fill it/them out, thereby identifying themselves as nuisance bots.

Nuisance bots are then told to "go away and leave us alone" or similar.

I had been receiving between 10 and 20 spam messages from bots through my contact form most days. The last 3 days have been bot spam-free!

The nuisance bots are now being slapped. If you like smacking bots this is one way to get the job done.

If you want to try out WP Armour you can download it under Plugins in the WordPress dashboard. It's very simple to set up (plug and play) and free! There's a premium version that apparently broadens the spam detection methods: the free version does what I want at this time.

If you have knowledge of other solutions to this problem, please share in the comments.
:-)
Richard

PS. I tested the site load speed before and after implementation. It made no difference to the load time.