WordPress Anti-Spam and Security Plugin – On Stealth Mode!

OK, you may be asking what in the world is a stealth mode anti-spam and security plugin? Before I explain what that is, let me run you to some quick facts.

Some of you may already know the importance of keeping your WordPress site as secured as possible and preferebly free from spammers. Those that do nothing but attempt to use bots or any other form of attack to leave comments, and/or attempt to login into your site just do it for the sheer fun or, those deliberate attacks that are aimed to do your site some harm.

Obviously, there is simply no way that you can “bulletproof” your WordPress sites security to 100%, nonetheless, the more “counter-measures” you have in place, the less likely you will have to deal with potential problems in the future. Some of those counter measures can be in the form of using “Captcha” for comments or any type of “human detection” mechanism. But we all know that the using captcha can be very annoying for users, end up steering them away, and within the process loosing valuable interaction and traffic.

On another front is the matter of “brute force” attacks. Brute force attacks is a systematic trial-and-error method used by someone to force its way into your site. In many cases the process is done using an automated software that generates a large number of consecutive guesses. This type of attack can be resource-consuming and hamper your WordPress sites performance.

The following measures can be used to defend against brute force attacks:

• Requiring users to have complex passwords and in some cases using captchas
• Limiting the number of times a user can attempt to log in
• and temporarily blocking users who exceed the specified maximum number of login attempts

With that said, would it not be nice to have a “counter measure” that can do the job of an anti-spam, enhance security and at the same time work in the background (stealth)?

Enter, Goodbye Captcha. An anti-spam and security plugin who’s purpose is to identify spam bots without any annoying and hard to read captcha images.

As the author of the plugin says…

Goodbye Captcha completely eliminates spam-bot signups, spam comments, even brute force attacks, the second you install it on your WordPress website. It is completely invisible to the end-user – no need to ever fill out a Captcha or other “human-detection” field ever again – and it just works!

So what makes Goodbye Captcha different?

One of the interesting features I found about the plugin is that when it detects a suspicious activity, rather than moving the spam comments to your spam folder, what the plugin does is that it prevents the bots from leaving the spam in the first place and therefore not land into your folder. Other types of anti-spam will simply move it to your spam folder and you will have to deal with it later. Needless to say that it could be a time comsuming process, among other things. Cool!

And it is perfectly understandable that you have a lot of questions about the this anti-spam plugin.

How do you install and configure Goodbye Captcha?

While there are several ways to do this, I would recommend going to your WordPress backend, goto to plugins > add new > type Goodbye Captcha in the search field > install and activate.

Watch the small video presentation below on how to do it and for a bit more of info.

As you can see, easy installation and packed with features.

And oh, Google captcha will work with the following plugins:

• MailChimp for WordPress – GoodBye Captcha offers protection for all forms the user will create with MailChimp
• WP User Control – GoodBye Captcha offers protection for Login, Registration and Lost Password forms
• JetPack by WordPress – GoodBye Captcha offers protection for JetPack Contact Form
• and more…

And in case you are wondering, GoodBye Captcha works very well in tandem with other plugins like Akismet for example. You do not have to uninstall Akismet or any other anti-spam plugin in order to have GoodBye Captcha protecting your forms. You can run them both!

Here’s a summary of Goodbye Captcha features

• Standard WordPress Login form integration
• Standard WordPress Comments form integration
• Logging with the ability to enable/disable it
• Limit the number of allowed attempts
• Automatically Block IP Address if number of allowed attempts is reached
• Manually whitelist trusted IP Address
• Properly detects client IP Address when using CloudFlare, Incapsula, Cloudfront, RackSpace – this is an important feature for those who use CloudFlare for example.
• Provides statistics, reports, maps and charts with all blocked spam attempts
• Compatible with WordPress Multisite
• Compatible with cache plugins (WP Super Cache, W3 Total Cache, ZenCache and others)
• Invisible for end users (works in the background – stealth)

There you go. If you are looking for an anti-spam with security featuures, great support from the developer, and a lot more, try using Goodbye Captcha. Not only does it work well, you can get it directly on the WordPress repository. Do I have to tell you what that means? LOL.

Let me know if you test it out. I would love to hear what you think about it.