Antispam for websites: how to protect yourself from bots in comments

All sites, without exception, suffer from spambots. Advertising dubious ways to make money in the comments spoils your reputation and scares off users. Empty registrations greatly distort the real statistics of online stores and prevent the owners from correctly assessing the situation. If you do not have such problems, then:

You don't have a website. Why are you reading this at all?
Nobody visits your site. And first of all, you need to solve this particular problem.
You do not allow users to register, leave comments and reviews. But in vain.

Why allow users to leave comments

The life hacker tried to disable comments, and nothing good came of it. Without communicating with users, we started to lose our community.

The community is made up of active loyal users, your best friends. You can't do without them. They write, discuss, give practical advice, help newcomers, share opinions, experience and knowledge. Discussion in the comments is about audience return, an increase in the number of visits and the lifespan of content.

Visitor activity makes the site more popular. But where there are a lot of people, spammers inevitably turn up. With them, even the most comfortable blog quickly turns into a trash heap. It is unpleasant to look at her, even more so to visit her.

How to get rid of spam without closing comments and reviews

1. Hire a moderator

You hire someone who monitors new comments and reviews, removes spam, and bans those who leave it.

A plus: high detection accuracy. A person is able to detect not only spam, but also trolls, provocateurs and simply undesirable individuals who conduct destructive activities.
Minuses: the moderator must be paid a salary. And the moderator is also asleep, but the spammers are not asleep. This means that you need several people to work in shifts.

2. Install standalone antispam program

You can install standalone antispam on your server. For correct operation, you need to carry out the initial configuration, and then periodically update the program.

Pros: the program works around the clock, does not get tired or lazy.
Minuses: an antispam robot can skip spam or punish innocent people. It is not capable of detecting implicit unwanted messages: provocation, trolling and dissemination of information contrary to the laws of the Russian Federation. The accuracy of the program and the amount of server resources it consumes depends on the skill of the developer.

3. Use cloud antispam

Cloud antispam is the most advanced protection option. You install the plugin and it automatically checks comments and registrations, blocking spammers and not disturbing regular users. For example, you can use Cleantalk, a cloud-based anti-spam service for 550 rubles per year with a free 7-day trial period.

Pros: invisible to the user, easy to install, does not require manual updates, is much cheaper than other protection methods.
Minuses: Although cloud-based antispam services do not have the disadvantages of standalone programs, the likelihood of a false positive will still be higher than if the site was manually moderated by a human. But you will spend at least 40,000 rubles a month on the salaries of the moderators.

How cloud antispam services work

The advantage of cloud-based antispam over autonomous ones is easiest to explain using the example of grandmothers. Imagine grandmothers sitting on benches in courtyards. They vigilantly watch that muddy personalities do not enter the entrances of houses, and actively communicate with each other.

As soon as one grandmother sees a suspicious person, in a few minutes all grandmothers in the vicinity will know about him. Signs, clothes, with whom and from where he went, what he carried in his hands - a complete detailed portrait. Now he will definitely not get into any entrance in the area.

Cleantalk works in much the same way. A unified system protects more than 250 thousand sites. As soon as a spammer pokes his nose at one site, the system will close his access to all other sites. The process is automatic; you do not need to manually update the blacklists.

Cleantalk allows you to set up individual stop word filters and records all actions in the logs. So you can create personal protection for yourself and you will always know who did what and whether innocent people were caught.

An important advantage of a cloud service is that it works invisibly and does not annoy users.

Everyone knows what a captcha is. You want to write a comment or do something else, but you are asked to enter barely readable letters or numbers from the picture, poke at all the images on which there is a bus, and the like. Enrages? And how. I want to spit and leave the site. Many people do just that. Captcha significantly reduces the activity and loyalty of the community.

Cleantalk acts imperceptibly and, unlike the same captcha, works correctly when the user has disabled JS and cookies in the browser. No confirmation forms or other annoying, time-consuming things, much less load on the site and much easier installation.

Other useful Cleantalk features

Checking existing users and comments … If your site already has a lot of comments and users, Cleantalk can check them all and put things in order.
Blocking by country and language … You can rid your site of Mordor speaking orcs.

Reducing server load and protection against brute force … As part of Cleantalk, there is a SpamFirewall tool that checks requests before submitting site pages for loading. Thus, the resources of the server on which your site is located are spent only on good users, and not on spammers and bots.
A handy WordPress plugin … If you, like Lifehacker, also use the best and most popular CMS, then installing and configuring antispam will be even easier for you. Download the Cleantalk plugin from the WordPress directory and get started right away.
Free trial period. It allows you to fully study the service and its capabilities, test it on your website and understand whether Cleantalk is right for you or not.

Spam can be defeated. Test Cleantalk and see for yourself.