The Technical Side of Blogging – Part 2: Using Spam Filters

DudeBloggers, Education, General, Technology 4 Comments

Spam filters in a blog are as important as your AC filter. If you don’t have it you’ll have all sorts of trash and ads and spam messages in your comments. Wouldn’t that mean you’ll have a lot of comments? Ofcourse it will show as if you have 100’s of 1000’s of comments, but all of them will only generate more spam and might link to phishing sites. Therefore you’ll end up getting so many trash comments your visitors will stop looking at the comments and eventually stop commenting since they can’t find the reply to their comments.

What to use ?

I suggest you use Akismet.

For personal blogs its a free option, that filters out all your comments. Setting it up takes a few mins and a couple of verification emails for an API key. But overall it does the job pretty well and saves you the trouble and effort of looking through all the comments.

How to install Akismet in WordPress?

Here’s a video that’s illustrates how it’s done :

http://youtu.be/d2pr8gISWGA

If you use the FS Contact forms plugin, make sure you have a look at this post  to ensure you don’t get annoying emails from the spam Filters.

Captcha Codes : What are they and why we might use them ?

Captcha codes are those codes you have to enter usually before hitting submit, its a form of verification that ensures that the entity entering the information is a Human being and not an online script or bot. This will in turn reduce the spam messages that you might recieve since bots cannot access the the submit button because they cannot automatically identify and fill in the captcha codes.

I tried implementing captcha codes a while back on 7ajidude (plugin called “Captcha”), but due to popular demand i had to remove it since it affected our commentors. It required a simple math calculation but was an extra hurdle we decided later on to live without. 

Sometimes without implementing Captcha codes you get so many spam messages your database fills up quickly and it takes so much resources especially if you’re bombarded with a lot of spam messages all at once. Deciding on whether to use them or not is your choice but if you feel you are affected by too many spam comments and if the processes on your hosting are too high, i’d look at implementing captcha codes for 2 weeks and evaluate the performance and load on servers again. 

That’s the end of part 2. Remember if you have any question please do ask them and i’ll try to include an answer if not here in the comments section in parts 3 and 4. 

For a reminder:

In part 3 we’ll discuss using CDN’s and Storage options to speed up the load time of your website.

In part 4 we’ll discuss the different Plugins that we can use to help us in blogging!

 

The Technical Side of Blogging – part 1

DudeBloggers, General, Technology 8 Comments

The past two days I’ve been looking for ways to make 7ajidude faster and more optimized so that we can ensure that the site loads faster and performs better overall. As most of you know we’ve changed web hosts a couple of times, and the performance of the website is affected on the location of the host, the uplink provided by the host and the website’s optimization.  7ajidude also provides a lot of photos within posts, which makes the optimization and enhancements a little more tricky. Int the next couple of days I’ll guide you through the steps that i’ve taken to improve the performance of the blog overall. The following are the basic changes that have to be done in the beginning.

1. Ensure you have the latest wordpress  as well as the latest version of your blog’s theme (also have to ensure they are both compatible).

Check the latest version here: http://wordpress.org/download/

This will make sure that you have the latest security updates and fixes to ensure that your blog would be safe from attacks and as stable as it should be.

2. Disable all un-used an un-necessary plugins.

Sometimes we install 3-4 plugins that do the same function especially when testing to add a new feature to the blog, and we forget that all of these plugins will run in the background requesting processor power as well as for some being loaded when the site is loading. Sometimes some plugins actually affect other installed plugins negatively therefore you should always ensure that

3. Make sure all your used plugins are updated.

In wordpress simply go into the plugins page and check that non of the plugins require updates.

 

In part 2 we’ll discuss why you should use spam filters, and consider using Captcha codes and their impact on the performance and load on your website.

In part 3 we’ll discuss using CDN’s and Storage options to speed up the load time of your website.

In part 4 we’ll discuss the different Plugins that we can use to help us in blogging!

Don’t hesitate to add your comments and questions, I’ll try to answer as many as I can as we go along.  Happy Blogging.

 

Spam emails in your inbox after plugin updates?

DudeBloggers, General, Internet, Technology, Tutorials Leave a Comment

We use the Akismet Spam filter on our blog, as well as the FS Contact form, and lately we were getting so much Spam in our inbox which was quite odd and it only happened after updating some outdated plugins.

The fix was simple, apparently a new option to pass on Spam that was stopped in the contact form to the email was enabled, and so we were getting quite a number of unusual Spam messages (labelled Akismet: Spam” in our inbox.

To fix all you need to do is  :

1. Go to the FS Contact form options (plugins -> FS Contact forms options)

2. Scroll Down to the akismet spam options and change the settings to “Block Spam Messages” Apparenlty these settings were somehow changed after the update to “Tag as Spam and send anyway”

3. Click on “Update Settings” and voila  – No More Tagged Spam messages in Your inbox!!