Websites featuring user-generated content (UGC) are becoming extremely popular nowadays. But companies and individuals who run UGC WordPress websites must figure out a way to protect themselves and their brands from negative and/or inappropriate submissions made by users. Use of profanity and spamming are crucial issues and they can only be dealt with the help of UGC content moderation.
While your goal is to create a site that is fun and engaging for users, you must also be able to protect your WordPress site from users who indulge in profane language and spammers who try hijack-marketing and litigious methods.
One of the best ways to drive customer engagement on your WordPress website is incorporating social computing features that make it more interactive. Features like comments, reviews, polls, blogs, and ratings add a lot of value to a site and help foster a community around your brand. However, adding such features to your website also brings along its own set of challenges. You would love to have users commenting on the articles you post or want to leave user-generated product reviews and recommendations on the site. But what about the users who abuse this privilege of interaction? There are plenty of UGC moderation tools that can help you weed out these users and keep them at bay, so that your brand identity does not suffer. Some of these tools focus on filtering out profanity while others act as effective spam blockers. So let us take a look at the top four spam-blocking plug-ins, available for WordPress websites.
1. Akismet
No one hates spam as much as the owners of WordPress websites. In fact, spammers are hated by website owners and other users alike. No one wants to read a thread that consists of a few genuine comments and loads of spam. When you operate a website, it becomes your duty to ensure that there are no spamming comments or reviews on it. But how do you go about it? One of the best spam-blocking plug-ins for WordPress websites is Akismet. Launched in 2005, Akismet is a complex filtering engine that is very easy to use. It keeps track of the various comments, pingbacks, and trackbacks by users. Using that data, Akismet's plug-in works by rigorously testing all the entries to filter out the spam. All comments categorized as spam by Akismet are directly pushed into your spam folder. You can, of course, check your spam folder to ensure that only spam is being filtered out and no errors are being committed. There might be a few times that Akismet will err on the side of caution and mark genuine comments and entries as spam, but you can rest assured that the system is an intelligent one and the longer you use it, the better it gets at identifying posts you deem to be spam. Akismet is free for small WordPress sites while bigger commercial sites have to pay a monthly fee of $5. But considering the service it provides, the amount is a small one.
2. Anti-spam
Anti-spam is a simple, no-nonsense spam filter plug-in. As the name suggests, Anti-spam is completely against any kind of spam. Once configured, this plug-in automatically detects spam and makes it disappear without a trace. This means other users will not have to put up with captcha and website administration won't have to look through long moderation queues. The spam will be gone for good.
However, one of the downsides of Anti-spam is that the spam will be gone for good - made completely invisible by the plug-in. There are no options to find out what the plug-in is categorizing as spam and if there is any mistake, you will just have to forget about it. As Knuth says, "Premature optimization is the root of all evil." But there is something to be said for all the headaches that premature optimization can save you. In Anti-spam's case, it gets it right more times than wrong.
3. Growmap Anti Spambot Plugin (GASP)
GASP may not have as many downloads as Akismet, but it does have a stunning 4.9 out of 5 rating on WordPress. What does this mean? It means that GASP is a very good anti-spam plug-in. GASP is mainly concerned with automated spam sent your way by spambots. This effective anti-spam tool is absolutely infallible when it comes to combating spambots or automated spammers. However, there's one downside to this plug-in - its effectiveness suffers greatly when it comes to human spammers. All you need to do to validate you are a human is put a checkmark in the provided box. Needless to say, human spammers can do this just as well as other users. While this is crucial, the bottom line is that GASP is not pretending to be anything that it is not. Growmap Anti Spambot Plugin keeps spambots out - all of them, all the time.
4. WP-reCaptcha
Websites like Facebook and Twitter love reCaptcha. In order to ensure that you are a genuine user and not a bot, you will have to give permissions and enter reCaptcha phrases. reCaptcha can also be used for your WP site. The WordPress version of this famous plug-in is WP-reCaptcha. This WP plug-in does not subscribe to the age-old verification system that other anti-spam plug-ins use. Older verifications use simple font and words that can easily be bypassed by Optical Character Recognition (OCR) systems used by spambots. In contrast, WP-reCaptcha stops spambots by using a unique system that puts forward archaic font and word combinations that would be near-impossible for spambots to decipher. Therefore, your WP site will be spam-free.
Other popular options for UGC moderation, anti-profanity, and anti-spam plug-ins are Spam Stopper, Defensio Anti-spam, and SPAM Free WordPress. Look for a plug-in that you find easy to install and use, and would like to continue using for a long time.