Block Comment Spam Bots vs WP Mail Logging

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.

WP Mail Logging is the most popular plugin for logging emails sent from your WordPress site. Simply activate it and it will work immediately, no extra configuration is needed. Are your WordPress emails not being sent or delivered? Use this plugin to log all outgoing emails from your WordPress site. If there are any errors when sending the email from your site, our email logs will catch that error and display it to you. This will allow you to debug and fix your email sending issue. Did a client not receive your email? Our email logs allow you to resend any email that was sent from your site. No more lost emails! Do you just want to keep a record of all emails sent from your site? By default, WordPress and your web host do not log, store or keep track of emails sent from your website. This plugin will allow you to do just that. Our email logs will store every email that is sent from your WordPress site. You can search and view a particular email log, inspect its content or attachments, and even resend that email. What email information is logged? All emails sent from your WordPress site are logged. And here is the information that is stored: Email Subject Email Content (HTML or text) Email Attachments Email Headers (to, from, reply-to, cc, bcc, …) Error Message (in case there was an error while attempting to send the email) IP Address of originating server (can be enabled in the settings) Date and Time of the email Receiver (the TO email address) Why are my logged emails still not delivered to the inbox? There are a lot of steps that emails have to make in order to be delivered to the recipient’s inbox. When your WordPress site sends an email, there’s no guarantee it will be delivered. This is what the email’s journey looks like: WordPress creates an email WordPress passes the email to your website host and that email gets logged by our plugin The host server takes the email and sends it (SMTP or Mail Transfer Agent) Recipient server receives or blocks the email If the email is accepted, the spam filter decides if it goes to the inbox or the spam folder Recipients see the email and might open it. This plugin does not track delivery after step 2. If you have deliverability issues, we suggest installing the WP Mail SMTP plugin. WP Mail SMTP fixes WordPress email deliverability problems, you can choose between 12 email providers (Gmail, Outlook, SendLayer, Mailgun, …) to resolve your email sending issue and it’s super easy to set up. WP Mail SMTP is trusted by more than 3 million websites. Credits The plugin was created and launched in 2014 by Christian Zöller.