Human Presence Wins against WordPress Spam in Comments and Forms
The war on WordPress spam
As an owner of a WordPress site, you will no doubt be familiar with the age-old battle against comment and form spam.
Those countless hours wasted sifting through your comments sections and manually deleting all of the spam rubbish that has been dumped on your site.
And then we have the emails! It’s almost as if your contact form has a huge sign on it saying “please send me all of your irrelevant marketing drivel and put your subject lines in ALL CAPITAL LETTERS.”
This is really enough to drive one crazy.
There must be a solution!
Plugins to the rescue
There are a whole host of tools and plugins now available to help combat spam.
The only problem is that now there are so many that finding the right one takes almost as long as deleting all of the spam on your site manually!
There are a few that are better than others. Akismet, for example, behaves like what we call a ‘honeypot’ in computer terminology. This means that it detects, deflects, or counteracts attempts at unauthorized use of an information system, aka your website.
reCAPTCHA is the system most people are familiar with because it is broadly used on many sites that require you to submit information (such as a form) or create an account.
These systems do work, but with varying degrees of success. We have tried all of the good ones and found that none of them were 100% successful at stopping spam from slipping through the cracks. Actually, many of them were barely even 60% effective!
A new kid on the block
There is a NEW player in town called Human Presence and we have been blown away by the success we are seeing. It is proving to be a real game-changer both for comment spam and contact form spam!
As they state on their website, the Human Presence solution was created to block both bots and spammers by using proprietary behavior analysis to invisibly detect and record individual session actions.
This new plugin boasts 99% reliability thanks to its unique algorithm that measures even the slightest movement inactivity to detect robot spammers. Basically, it knows whether you are human or not based on how you are using the mouse and keyboard to interact with a page.
So the bottom line really is that you no longer need to worry about being spammed on your WordPress site ever again!
Proven success
We decided to test out the service by performing a case study with one of our KartHost clients. Their site had been receiving a large number of spam comments on a daily basis, and just as much spam in their email inbox coming in via their website contact form.
When we activated the Human Presence plugin, ALL of the spam comments and spam emails that had been funneling in through the contact form stopped. All of them!
As you can see in the screenshot below, the Human Presence plugin indicates the number of spam attempts for both WordPress comments and contact form attempted submissions. While this screenshot doesn’t show it (wish I had a screenshot of their comments they had over 1,000,000+ comments!).
A better service for you
Since the undeniable success of our trials with this plugin, we have added Human Presence to all our WordPress Hosting Options using our Advanced Managed VPS – Hosting for WordPress at no additional charge!
We want you to know that our services are constantly evolving and we never stop finding new ways of improving your WordPress experience.
We are big believers in the value and trust derived from starting conversations with your visitors and followers. And Human Presence will make for a better experience using WordPress.
The benefits to your business can be huge. Comments can aid in further developing your product based on feedback from real users, and you could even extract a glowing customer review left in the comments section to use as a testimonial.
The possibilities are endless.
