REPELLING MALICIOUS CONTENT
by Contributor
(Jan. 29, 2020) — In the 21st century, the Internet has become an irreplaceable part of the world community. Nevertheless, the Net experience is not always pleasant. With the growth of its popularity, several issues occurred, one of which is spam. It is not only annoying but can be dangerous as a source of computer viruses.
What Spam Is and Why You Need to Fight It
To understand why fighting spam is important, one may visit the official Cleantalk website, as well as get to know more about it. Spam is an anonymous unsolicited mailing. Everybody has had experience with spam at least once. Usually, it comes in the form of emails that are sent massively to all the users in a certain database. Spam is the source of a number of serious problems. It may seem that spam is harmless, but it is not true. By virtue of its anonymity, it is an excellent tool for fraud; advertising illegal, fake and counterfeit goods; and the dissemination of pornography and other crimes. In addition, spam is a means of delivering malicious code. At the same time, the malicious program can be located either in the attachment to the message or on the site that opens via the link from the spam message. Spam can also be used as a platform to lure users to fake sites designed to steal confidential information.
How Can I Fight Spam?
There are several ways for you to fight spam on your website. Let’s review their advantages and disadvantages so you can choose a suitable option:
- Anti-Spam Services
Luckily, you do not need to worry about spam anymore. There are a number of ways to solve this problem. The most convenient and easy is the official website of a service designed specifically to help users delete all spam messages from their websites. One needs a cloud-based anti-spam service that will check the comments, orders, widgets, contacts, and registrations to locate spam information and delete it.
Modern anti-spam plugins provide the following advantages:
- It will take you only five minutes to download the program and complete registration.
- Moreover, you should not worry about your website working slower. Due to the newest technologies, these programs will not impact the speed of your website.
- The visitors will not even know that there is an anti-spam program working.
Another great advantage of using an anti-spam program is an accurate statistic of your website. You do not have to worry about the site going down due to spam comments and messages. You will only spend your time on the real users who create real traffic for your site. With this perspective, there are only advantages in using an anti-spam program as it is an affordable way to protect your website from any unwanted spam activity.
- Captcha on the website
One of the most common ways that help to fight spam on a site is CAPTCHA. The abbreviation stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. The name speaks for itself. It is an automated program that creates a test that each user should pass to finish registration. It can also appear during other actions on the website. For example, after a user reads an article on a site, there is an opportunity to leave a comment and share thoughts. To do that, he needs to log in or complete a captcha test: there will be a picture and a form. A user needs to write what he sees in the picture. You can connect this service in the plugins by activating captcha in the admin panel. Captcha in many cases is very effective and is present on almost any site with registration and comment section.
CAPTCHA can be presented as an automatically-generated image of several characters that you need to enter in the form below, or as an audio file. Despite all the advantages, this method is losing its popularity due to one significant con. Users are usually very annoyed by the fact that they need to fill in some additional forms and do some tests even after registration or logging in. That is why a lot of website visitors leave and do not finish registration to avoid spending extra time.
- Moderation
You can also do comment moderation through the admin panel. It means that you will have to check each comment separately. If you determine that it is a spam, you would have to block one account at a time.
The disadvantage of controlling comments and preventing spam is that you have to do all this manually. And over time, most likely, this procedure will take you more and more time, which, of course, is not very productive.
With this perspective, it is clear that the best way to protect your website from spam is to use an anti-spam service. It will take you only several minutes to choose one, register, and start with the cleaning process. It is an affordable, easy, and efficient way to protect your website from spam comments and bots.