Stop WordPress Comment Spam With Bad Behavior

In this post you’re going to learn how to stop spam­bots from spam­ming your blog.  This will also serve as a great first step in lock­ing down your blog while pre­vent­ing auto­mated attacks, DOS attacks, increased band­width and avoid high CPU uti­liza­tion (thus sav­ing you money, and poten­tial downtime).

This entire process will take less than 60 sec­onds to imple­ment, and will save you so much time and heartache (deal­ing with spam­bots, spam email, and poten­tial cut-offs with your host­ing provider, etc).

Read the arti­cle, watch the video, fol­low the steps, imple­ment it, and make sure to leave me a com­ment below with your thoughts and feedback.

Image By the_repairman

Sounds Use­ful, What is it?

What I said before may seem like a lot, but it’s just the tip of the ice­berg as far as this plu­gin is con­cerned. If your blog has been up for any time then you know the prob­lem with spambots.

But if not, let me share an all to famil­iar sce­nario with you… There are many ways to make money on the inter­net, one of them is by get­ting peo­ple to come to your web­site and buy stuff from you (which is all well and good).

How­ever, some peo­ple would pre­fer to “cheat” and try and get peo­ple to visit their web­site by “attack­ing” yours. They do this by  get­ting peo­ple to visit a cer­tain web­site or to view a cer­tain page.  Each time this is done, the per­son who sent you there gets any­where from a few pen­nies to a dol­lar or so (which is why you are usu­ally bom­barded with hun­dreds of pop-ups and pop-unders).

The way this works is, they down­load a tool, it parses some lists, and dis­plays web­sites that have a cer­tain pager­ank or is rel­e­vant to their market.

They then load up the tool to auto­mat­i­cally spam your site in hopes of get­ting vis­i­tors to visit their site (which usu­ally just spams you with pop-ups). The approach I men­tion above is one of the least inva­sive ways of doing this, and these peo­ple typ­i­cally mean you no harm (they just want your vis­i­tors so they can get some money).

See the prob­lem with the approach I men­tioned above is it takes a lit­tle bit longer to do.  Most spam­mers are too busy spam­ming to take an extra 30 sec­onds to tar­get their mar­ket (much less leave a unique mes­sage), so what they do is after pars­ing the list, they click a but­ton that sends out auto­mated com­ments on all the blogs they get on that list.

They click one but­ton, and your site (and pos­si­bly your friends) are now loaded with com­ments for Via­gra or many other “med­i­cines”. Besides the fact that your site gets ham­mered with fake com­ments that you need to delete, it also annoys your vis­i­tors (pos­si­bly caus­ing them to leave), waste band­width, waste cpu usage (your site has to take the com­ment, process it and then dis­play it), and depend­ing on how many peo­ple are tar­get­ing your site at one time, it could lead to a DOS attack (denial of ser­vice), increased bills (wasted band­width and CPU time costs), and even worse, stop the peo­ple you care about from vis­it­ing your site.

Can you blame them?  Your site is full of spam, slow (due to spam­mers “knock­ing at your door”) and pos­si­bly offline!

Wow, Did NOT Know That!  How Do I Stop This?

This part is real sim­ple, and takes less than 60 sec­onds to do.  If you’re not famil­iar with the new auto­mated approach to installing plu­g­ins, check­out my video / arti­cle titled “How To Install Word­Press Plu­g­ins” Assum­ing you have read that arti­cle, and have every­thing setup, lets pro­ceed with installing this and get­ting your site pro­tected.

1.) Login to your dash­board, scroll down until you see the plu­g­ins menu (under appear­ance) click the “add new” option (you may need to click the arrow next to it to see that option.) 2.) Change the type to Author and type in Firas and click Search. (at the time of this arti­cle Word­Press would not show me Bad Behav­ior when typed in as a term, so I used an author with a shorter name). 3.) The first option should be Bad Behav­ior, click the install but­ton to the right. 4.) You will get a popup, click the big red Install but­ton. 5.) Type in your FTP infor­ma­tion (Your Host­name, FTP Login and FTP pass­word.)  Please note this is NOT your Word­Press Login. 6.) Click Pro­ceed, and wait until you see the option to Acti­vate. 7.) Click Acti­vate, and your almost done just one more set­ting to Change. 8.) Back in your dash­board, look for the “Set­tings” panel on the left, you should see Bad Behav­ior, click it. 9.) Next you need to uncheck the option that says “dis­play sta­tis­tics in footer”, unless you want a lit­tle ban­ner on the bot­tom of your footer, click update and… 10.) You’re Done!

Video Overview Of The Process

Con­clu­sion

In this train­ing we went over how to stop spam­bots dead in their tracks before they even get the chance to cause harm. We did this by installing the Bad Behav­ior plu­gin.  I showed you step by step the exact 10 step process to install the plu­gin.  As you now know, this process takes less than 60 sec­onds and the ben­e­fits are massive.

Small change, big ben­e­fit. I want you to go out, and install this plu­gin now on your blog right now and feel free to leave me a com­ment below with your thoughts and feedback.

Tagged as: Plugin, security, Video, WordPress, Workflow