Guarding Against Bots
Comment spam is really not the problem. Spam is only a visual symptom of a much bigger problem. Protect your blog from the bots that freely roam the Internet. And, your comment spam problem will automatically be under control.
John H. Gohde asks: Are you in control of the Spiders, Crawlers, and Bots that are constantly trying to crawl your blog? Or, are you letting the bots take control? A big part of WordPress blog security is about installing plugins that block bots from accessing your blog.
Protect Your Blog From Bots
Automatically preventing bots from taking control of your blog requires the use of plugins. The interesting thing about plugins that attempt to control the bot problem is that they generally do not conflict with each other. Hence, you could literally install dozens of redundant plugins without generating a server error. And, simply let them fight it out for control. But, such an approach is rather silly.
Anytime that you are considering adding an additional bot control plugin, you should always be asking the following questions.
- What is the plugin trying to? And, does it substantially duplicate the protection already being offered by another one of your plugins?
- How does the plugin work?
- Where and how can you customize its actions?
- Where are the logs that prove that the plugin is actually working as intended?
And Gain Control Over Comment Spam
In general, do not use any plugin that keeps you in the dark. Or, does not allow you to customize it. You should be installing plugins that monitor areas that are subject to attacks from bots.
- Registration – You never want a bot to register as an user.
- Login – Hackers use bots to login as one of your regular users, such as theadmin administrator.
- Blacklists – You want to have at least one plugin that checks all access to your blog against a list of black-listed bots that are being maintained by somebody else. This is how you can let other people do the bulk of the work for you.
- Blocking access by IP addresse – Use at least one plugin that allows you to block your own private list of IP addresses.
- Blocking bots by User Agent names or by any other means – Sometimes you do not always have access to the IP addresses being used by bots. Or, perhaps the IP address keeps on changing. Having as many different options to block access to your blog will give you greater control.
