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We’ve always had a major problem with spam registrations, sploggers and bogus reviews on our WordPress sites. It’s a major time-consumer dealing with them and once one splogger is in they seem to attract others and it becomes almost impossible to keep ahead of a serious infestation. Akismet is good for comment spam but doesn’t stop anything else, particularly signups.
Up until recently we have always used Wangguard which seemed to perform well. But although it is still in the repositories the Wangguard signups process doesn’t seem to complete and unless you can get an API key it is useless. I have written to them many times and had no response so our latest site, Puraglow.com was not protected.
Puraglow is a new site and a couple of days ago I noticed our first suspicious signups — so I put one of the signup emails into Google to find there were 28 spam reports for the email address. I tried another and had the same response. We had over a hundred signups on Puraglow yesterday and I obviously don’t want to remove those that might be future valuable customers. I can probably make an educated guess on the basis of email names, domains and formats as to the ones I want to eject but frankly I have better things to do.
Going back to the website which found the dodgy email addresses I noticed it was called CleanTalk and they had a WordPress plugin. What’s more they had a plugin for just about every other CMS and they were presumably checking all against the same spam registers and their own, so weren’t just documenting WordPress spammers but those using Joomla and everything else.
The WordPress version claimed to work with comments, signups, forms, purchases — in fact pretty much any place where the public interacted with the website.
We don’t have a standard setup on any of our sites: we allow registrations, comments and reviews; we have forums and we use BuddyPress and GravityForms all over the place and Cloudflare so stopping sploggers and others getting in at the same time as getting customers through with legitimate business is not going to be easy. Clean Talk seemed to say that they would not only do this, they would do it without captchas, rearranging pictures, pinning the tail on the donkey, sums or any other on-form device which is a big plus when you have an international audience.
I admit being somewhat sceptical but I signed up, then installed the plugin from the WordPress repository and went through the signup process, which frankly is pretty simple. Basically you paste in a code they give you into the plugin dashboard and save the page and that is pretty much it. There is almost no configuration.
You can run a check on your existing users to find any suspects but other than that there is disconcertingly little to do.
I am currently on my 7 days free trial and so far things are going well, in fact so well I was concerned it was either not working at all, or generating false positives so I wrote to the developer, to be surprised to receive a very fast response (at 0630 on a Sunday morning – wish our customer service was as proactive) saying they had tested it on our site and all appeared well, could I check?. And checking, it was. Some signups blocked, some passed on a combination of IP information and email history, plus an opportunity to resolve false positives and report any missed but none on the face of it that appeared wrong.
CleanTalk is not a free product but it is cheap: It’s $9.99 for a single site for unlimited searches with graduated pricing through to
40 sites ($199.80) or above. There is currently 20% off. Or if you have a lot of sites with limited traffic you can cover all of them for $14.99 but you are restricted to 3000 daily checks.
From our point of view this is an absolute bargain in terms of time alone and well worth the expense and I am sincerely hoping that Cleantalk is the answer to a serious problem for us and other similar sites. Currently there appear to be 50,000+ WP installs and 1708 x 5* reviews. There are 51 x 1* reviews mostly from the “something-for-nothing” brigade complaining that although the plugin is free you have to pay for the service.
I am not connected with CleanTalk in any way other than as a future customer but if you are a professional developer or owner of a commercial site with any interaction with the public, Cleantalk is certainly worth considering.
https://cleantalk.org/
https://en-gb.wordpress.org/plugins/cleantalk-spam-protect/