In this post we’re going to go through CleanTalk and see how it’s a great tool.
CleanTalk is a highly effective spam filter, that prevents spam bots from accessing your site. Most spam protection plugins start operation at the site level. That means you’re wasting precious bandwidth on bots. CleanTalk is different.
How?
CleanTalk has an active firewall that prevents bots from even accessing your site. That means you save a lot in hosting costs, because you have a habit of bloating up traffic to your site. There’s little to no unnecessary burden on your site.
With the plugin, when a visitor accesses your site, their IP address is checked against CleanTalk’s big database of spam ips. This list contains at least 6 million spam ips. If a match is found, the visitor is blocked and will be sent to a blank page.
CleanTalk’s Spam FireWall Features
There’s a lot of protection available from spam bots because the tool stops them from ever making it to the website.
Spam bots tend to load the complete page for posting their comments. So in this case you’re wasting a visit to useless bot traffic. Your hosting costs are going to inflate without any reason or thought if this happens continuously.
DDos attack protection. Withd ddos service attacks a website is loaded so many times that the server finds itself overloaded.
Protection against RPC-XML attacks. Another type of attack that’s not very common but still prevalent in many circles is attacks on WordPress to get the username and password of the admin.
Another common form of attack is sql injection attacks used to glean the password and database names of the site.
Spam Firewall logs all the incidents that happen on the service.
And the firewall is available cross platform on WordPress and Joomla based website.s
Spam messages tend to be wrapped around in lots of content but hides links inside them. You can remove those links with the help of this tool.
Full Plugin Features
This is a very comprehensive plugin / service so lets take a look at the full run-down of what is included.
Comments spam protection – Cleantalk works along with plugins present in the WordPress ecosystem. You can easily integrate the protection you’re getting by combining with Jetpack or other comment moderation plugins.
With these plugins spam comments are automatically moved to the spam folder from where you can moderate the comments.
In addition to this, all activities that spam bots generally carry out like spam filling WordPress forms, BuddyPress Woocommerce and other public facing plugin registrations are also tracked by the plugin CleanTalk.
Again entries form plugins like Contact form 7 ninja forms, landing pages signups, gravity forms and contact forms are all monitored for spurious entries.
Woocommerce spam filter look for spam registrations and spammy reviews with woocommerce
The newsletters filter looks for spam signups to Mailchimp, Aweber, Mailpoet, popup alley and other newsletter plugins.
The spam filter plugin blocks spam entries via built in contact forms.
The plugin is also compatible with a load of cache plugins on wordpress like hyper cache w3 w3total cache hyper cache and super chance.
You can also check current comments for spam. And bulk remove spam with the help of CleanTalk. You can also get to existing comments and find comments that are spam and quickly remove them.
WIth the help of the tool you can remove bulk spam at one go. Check existing users for spam. And then delete spam at once by going to Wp console>users>check for spam.
The plugin doesn’t use one single test but multiple single tests to check for spam and report a lower number of false positives.
CleanTalk is a resource and file optimized wordpress plugin meaning there’s little to no chance of bloating your WordPress hardware with the presence of CleanTalk on the site. It’s way better than most anti spam plugins with its resource optimized neat lean structure.
Speed is a big factor when it comes to ranking your site on Google and other search engines and with its lean structure you are not bloating your hardware.
Setting up The Plugin
For using CleanTalk plugin create an account. Once done you will get a email with the login and access keys. DOwnload the plugin. Activate the same and configure the plugin on your site.
There’s a spam firewall that will block spammers from reaching your site.
In addition, to all this there’s an advanced settings area where you can use the plugin to delete spam comments automatically.
Conclusion
CleanTalk is hands down the best plugin to block spam on your WordPress site. It does a fantastic job of cleaning out spam and is way better than free plugins like Akismet or Jetpack at the job.
It does an extremely good job of preventing your site from getting hammered by spammers.
The P database of millions of IPs blocks spam no matter which site and database you use it for.
Not only comment spam, as a user you’re protected against all kinds of spam ranging from registration spam to everything else that can trouble your site.
Take a look at the plugin and its 14 day free trial.