We are receiving a lot of comments and trackbacks. This went on until 6000 messages in our mailbox. We turned the comments off and we are still receiving them in the website and mailbox. As we can see in our hosting there is a lot of unusual website traffic....The website environment is very slow because of this. How can we stop this spam?
There are some steps you can take to reduce the amount of spam you receive through your website, but it is really hard to eliminate it nowadays.
1. Google reCAPTCHA
You can add a captcha field to your contact forms. On this way spam bots are not able to send messages through the form because they won't proceed this captcha.
You can connect the Contact Form 7 plugin with Google Captcha by navigating to this URL and register your website to get the API key. This site and secret key can be added via Contact -> Integration.
After you've added both keys and the integration is successful you should notice the captcha label on the bottom right of your website.
If you don't want to use the captcha from Google you can install the Really Simple CAPTCHA plugin. To add this captcha to your form you can edit your forms and click on the "captcha" shortcode element above the form template (where the other form elements are located).
2. Honeypot
Another thing you could do is install the Contact Form 7 Honeypot plugin. You can use this plugin by adding another shortcode to your form template by clicking the "honeypot" button above the textarea.
This plugin will work on the background of the form and is not visible and won't bother users who submit the form. It creates a extra (hidden) input field. because real users don't see this field the message will go through. A spam bot will enter all fields and when the honeypot field is not empty the message doesn't come through.
3. Email Address Encoder
If you have displayed your email address somewhere on the website spam bots will pick this up. To prevent this you can install the Email Address Encoder plugin.
This plugin will encode any email address that's been added on your website in plain text so spam bots can't read them.
Obviously the best option is to remove any textual email address from your website so you don't have to use this plugin.
4. Remove comment section
You pointed out you've already removed the comment section from your website which will obviously reduce the amount of spam added to the comment fields.
5. Disable trackbacks
If you don't have a blogging website you can disable the trackback option from WordPress under Settings -> Discussion.
- Cloudflare
Another option is to connect Cloudflare to your website. Cloudflare reduce the spam comments and block other treats for your website due their security and firewall settings. Please note that Cloudflare is not the golden key to eliminate spam but every step is one in the right direction.
Hello,
We are receiving a lot of comments and trackbacks. This went on until 6000 messages in our mailbox. We turned the comments off and we are still receiving them in the website and mailbox. As we can see in our hosting there is a lot of unusual website traffic....The website environment is very slow because of this. How can we stop this spam?
Hi there,
There are some steps you can take to reduce the amount of spam you receive through your website, but it is really hard to eliminate it nowadays.
1. Google reCAPTCHA
You can add a captcha field to your contact forms. On this way spam bots are not able to send messages through the form because they won't proceed this captcha.
You can connect the Contact Form 7 plugin with Google Captcha by navigating to this URL and register your website to get the API key. This site and secret key can be added via Contact -> Integration.
After you've added both keys and the integration is successful you should notice the captcha label on the bottom right of your website.
If you don't want to use the captcha from Google you can install the Really Simple CAPTCHA plugin. To add this captcha to your form you can edit your forms and click on the "captcha" shortcode element above the form template (where the other form elements are located).
2. Honeypot
Another thing you could do is install the Contact Form 7 Honeypot plugin. You can use this plugin by adding another shortcode to your form template by clicking the "honeypot" button above the textarea.
This plugin will work on the background of the form and is not visible and won't bother users who submit the form. It creates a extra (hidden) input field. because real users don't see this field the message will go through. A spam bot will enter all fields and when the honeypot field is not empty the message doesn't come through.
3. Email Address Encoder
If you have displayed your email address somewhere on the website spam bots will pick this up. To prevent this you can install the Email Address Encoder plugin.
This plugin will encode any email address that's been added on your website in plain text so spam bots can't read them.
Obviously the best option is to remove any textual email address from your website so you don't have to use this plugin.
4. Remove comment section
You pointed out you've already removed the comment section from your website which will obviously reduce the amount of spam added to the comment fields.
5. Disable trackbacks
If you don't have a blogging website you can disable the trackback option from WordPress under Settings -> Discussion.
- Cloudflare
Another option is to connect Cloudflare to your website. Cloudflare reduce the spam comments and block other treats for your website due their security and firewall settings. Please note that Cloudflare is not the golden key to eliminate spam but every step is one in the right direction.
If you have any questions please let me know.
Best regards,
Barry
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