Stop Spam With reCAPTCHA WordPress Plugin

I’m starting to receive many spam comments on my site. My site now receives over 300 unsolicited comments every day. Too! These are becoming an epidemic. Normally, I wouldn’t see this kind of comments on my site, so the last topic the round table discussed I’ve today regards an useful tool to prevent it.

Most people will need to get a tool that will manage spam on their site/blog. reCAPTCHA is a WordPress plugin to prevent spam comments and spam feedback. It can be implemented in any php based website and it’s used by many websites to control abuse from automated programs usually written to generate spam.  The best news for myself and other web publisher is that the service is totally free, which amazes me.

Also, CAPTCHAs can help blind people, who cannot read images of distorted text through an audio test that allows to inserted a set of digits instead of the visual challenge.

How does it work

While humans can read distorted text as the one shown below, but current computer programs can’t:

The words that appear on your captchas are got from old books that were scanned and they cannot be read correctly by OCR. So reCAPTCHA sends them to the participating websites to be read correctly.

How Does it Install

reCAPTCHA requires very little installation:

1. Download the zip file.
2. Unzip the recaptcha folder into your WordPress wp-content/plugins directory.
3. Activate the plugin on the Options | Plugins Management page of your WordPress admin site. A web form will prompt you to enter a public and private API key. You can sign-up for the keys at the ReCAPTCHA site using the link provided, and then enter them in the text fields to activate the plugin.
4. That’s it! Your reCAPTCHA widget should now appear on the comments page.

How Does To Use It

Once to the user read both words(separated by a space), this helps to identify spam comments that someone could to sent through automated programs. If you are not sure what the words are, either enter your best guess or click the reload button next to the distorted words.

If you repeatedly find these words too hard to read, users can click the audio button to hear a set of digits that can be entered instead of the visual challenge.

Conclusion

So, to sum up, If you don’t want to lose something important, reCAPTCHA offers you a free useful plugin for those that want to keep control of their comments, to prevent indesiderable spam message.