Block Comment Spam Bots vs UpdraftPlus

Professional spammers use programs to automate their spamming. The ‘Block Comment Spam Bots’ (BCSB) plugin efficiently blocks their process. No more comment spam! As no legitimate user will use the professional spammer’s automated process which relies on cURL and WGET commands, real users will never notice the BCSB plugin at work. There are no CAPTCHAS for your visitors to interact with. No silly questions. Just the comment form as designed in any theme. On the admin side, there are no blacklists, special keys (like Askimet), overloaded spam queues, or overworked databases that store spam comments until you manually delete them. Install the plugin and that’s it. Invisible, to you and your visitors. The only change you will notice is in your admin area. The list of comments now has a green check next to them. That way you know that comment was made on your website by a real person and was not bypassed by hacking spammers connecting directly to your server. All that remains is comments made by real people, and while real people can spam, it takes them time and effort. The amount of spam from real people is a lot more manageable than the tsunami from automated spammers, saving you time to concentrate on the important things in life, like your readers, and making connections. We’ve tested it on multiple websites and it wipes out automated spam completely. If it doesn’t on your site, please let us know. ** Geeky Stuff ** …in case you are interested in how it works… tl;dr – This provides a total and easy solution to comment spam from spam bots. Comments are processed by the WordPress wp-post-comments.php file. Automated spammers (‘spam bots’) can provide (‘post’) data directly to that page, bypassing any comment processing, by using CURL/WGET commands. Bypassing the comment form by posting directly (via CURL or WGET commands), is quite easy. Just send the post ID number, and the bot’s fake name and email, and the spammy content. Boom! Comment spam is on your site! The result is comment spam – and that is not always caught by other comment spam checkers. Even if it is caught by programs such as Akismet, processing that spam takes some server resources, including writing to the database. This plugin uses several techniques to ‘sense’ a spambot. There are hidden fields that are changed after a delay. There is a delay in displaying the submit button. And it blocks direct access to the WordPress post/processing functions. The techniques, also used in our standalone “FormSpemmerTrap” (FST) program, and our other anti-spam plugins (like FormSpammerTrap for Comments), are very effective. They use a bit of JavaScript to block spambots – since automated processes via CURL/WGET/etc cannot process JS code. It’s simple: you install this plugin, activate it, and bot comments will stop. Immediately. And it doesn’t add any visual impediments to your comments. No reCaptcha things (which many see as a pain). No silly questions (‘what is 2+8’) on the form. Your comment form does not change. Regular users will not notice a difference. But you will. No more spam comments for you! This is the best solution to block comment spam. We’ve tested it on a site that had 20-40 spam comments a day. With this plugin enabled, the spam comment stopped. Immediately. And there have been none since installing this plugin. ** Not one. Zero.** The Admin, Comments list page is modified to show a column with a green checkmark icon if the comment was entered by a real person and not a bot. This is an assurance that the comment was not entered via an automated CURL/WGET to the wp-comments-post.php file. A comment that is on the list that does not show the checkmark was done by a bot. But you won’t see those blocked comments with this plugin enabled. They never get into your database. You can hover over the checkmark icon to see the GUID value indicating a person entered the comment. The plugins ‘Settings’ screen has no settings. You don’t even need to look at the Settings screen. If you do, you’ll see information about the plugin. And there is a CURL command you can use to test the effectiveness of blocking (or not blocking) direct access to the wp-comments-post.php file. The plugin also adds the hidden GUID field to the comment form after a delay to help block bots that are using the comment form to submit. If the hidden field is not submitted then a bot tried to bypass the comment form. And a short delay happens before the comment submit button is displayed – another bot protection.

The UpdraftPlus Backup & Migration Plugin is trusted by the WordPress community to backup, restore and migrate their WordPress websites. UpdraftPlus is actively installed on more than 3 million websites around the world. Backup with UpdraftPlus UpdraftPlus is the world’s highest ranking and most popular scheduled backup and migration plugin. Backup to your preferred storage location and restore in just three clicks. Backup to Dropbox, Google Drive, Amazon S3 (or compatible), Rackspace Cloud, FTP, DreamObjects, Openstack Swift or email. The paid version also allows you to backup to Microsoft OneDrive, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Backblaze B2, SFTP, SCP, pCloud, WebDAV or UpdraftVault, our integrated storage option for UpdraftPlus. Backup manually or schedule to run every 2, 4, 8 or 12 hours, daily, weekly, monthly or fortnightly. Restore with UpdraftPlus Your WordPress website is vulnerable. Your site may get hacked. Something could go wrong with an update or your server could crash. You might need to reverse a change made or a mistake caused by human error. Whatever the reason, you can restore your WordPress website in just a few clicks with UpdraftPlus. Choose which components to restore (e.g. plugins, themes, database etc.), click again to restore, then click again to return to the main screen. Migrate with UpdraftPlus It’s easy to migrate your WordPress website to another web host, server or domain with this free version of UpdraftPlus. To migrate, simply download your database, plugins, themes etc. from the source site, then upload them into your destination site. When migrating, a built-in search-and-replace engine identifies old strings and replaces these to reflect the new location. UpdraftPlus saves you time and reduces the risk of broken links or missing files associated with manual migrations. Why UpdraftPlus? Writing a reliable backup and migration plugin that ‘just works’ consistently across millions of different WordPress deployments is hard. UpdraftPlus is relied upon to do exactly that. We’re trusted and actively deployed on more websites around the world than any other WordPress backup and migration plugin. UpdraftPlus: Backs up, migrates and restores Offers a huge number of remote storage locations Allows you to schedule backups, so you can ‘set and forget’ Is comprehensive and easy to use Is proven to work on over 3 million sites. UpdraftPlus Premium The free version of UpdraftPlus will back up and migrate your website perfectly well. However if you need more features and options you can purchase our Premium version. Backup and Migrate with UpdraftPlus Premium, and: Get automatic backups before updates. Restore the very latest version if a WordPress or plugin update breaks your site. Backup Incrementally. Changes are added to the master, saving server resources vs repeatedly backing up in full. Get more remote storage options including Microsoft OneDrive, SFTP, Microsoft Azure, WebDAV, Google Cloud, SCP, Backblaze and pCloud. Get 1GB of integrated storage with UpdraftVault for 99.999% reliability, redundancy and scalability. Get more control over how many backups are stored in a specified interval. Restore from other backup plugins including BackWPup, BackupWordPress, Simple Backups and more. Run backups at set times e.g. during periods of low traffic. Backup to more than one location for added protection. Get detailed reports. Includes cryptographic checksums so you can verify the integrity of the backup files and more. Get Premium migration. Migrating to the destination site is more direct and can be done from the source site. Get Multisite / multi-network compatibility. Backup non-WP files and databases e.g. tables belonging to your e-commerce store or customisations to WordPress core. Get database encryption. Manage your backups and migrations from the WP-CLI. Get Premium Support. Find out more on our comparison page. UpdraftPlus Premium is available for purchase here. Managing multiple websites? UpdraftCentral is a powerful remote control dashboard for WordPress that allows you to manage your backups, as well as updates, users, pages, posts, plugins and themes from one central location. Choose between: UpdraftCentral (free, self-hosted) UpdraftCentral Premium (paid-for, self-hosted) UpdraftCentral Cloud (paid-for, fully-hosted) Optimize your sites centrally by combining the power of WP-Optimize and UpdraftCentral or manage your backups centrally by combining the power of UpdraftPlus with UpdraftCentral. Need to create a temporary clone of your site? UpdraftClone makes it quick and easy to create a temporary sandbox for changes you want to try out. Simply select the versions of WordPress and PHP that you want, and we’ll do the rest. More about UpdraftClone The full suite of plugins from Team Updraft and friends UpdraftPlus. Backup, migrate and restore. Rated 5* on the plugin directory and trusted by more than 3 million WordPress website owner WP-Optimize. Clean the database, compress images and caching. Optimize your WordPress website. 5* user rating. 1 million + active installs. All-In-One Security (AIOS). Secure your WordPress website. Comprehensive, feature rich and easy to use. 5* user rating and 1 million + active installs. WP Overnight. Quality Extensions for your WooCommerce store. 5* rated invoicing, order and product management, customer management solutions and more. Easy Updates Manager. Take control of updates. Lots of features for free, and a Premium version with even more – over 300,000 users. Internal Link Juicer.Boost your SEO. Automate internal links within your WordPress website. Save time and rank higher in the search engines. For other useful, free plugins see our lead developer’s profile, here. Are you multilingual? Can you translate? Do you want to help people that speak your language to backup, migrate and restore their WordPress websites? The UpdraftPlus backup, migration and restoration plugin is ready and waiting. The translation process is easy, and web-based – please go here for instructions: https://updraftplus.com/translate/. Or, if you’re already an expert WordPress translator, just pick out the .pot file from the wp-content/plugins/updraftplus/languages/ directory – if you scan for translatable strings manually, then you need to get these functions: _x(), __(), _e(), _ex(), log_e(). Many thanks to our existing translators. License Copyright 2011-24 David Anderson This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details. You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin St, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301 USA Non-English translators are provided by volunteers, and wordpress.org does not give plugin developers control over their translations; thus relying on them is at your own risk; UpdraftPlus cannot guarantee that translations from the original English are accurate. We recognise and thank those mentioned at https://updraftplus.com/acknowledgements/ for code and/or libraries used and/or modified under the terms of their open source licences.