Great until the spam bots found it

  • Small site with a few classifieds. Worked great – still works great – but now am being spammed with over 50 spam ads/day. Can’t believe there’s not a way to stop it without a paid reCaptcha add-on. ugh

    • This topic was modified 3 years, 4 months ago by fayratta.
Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • Plugin Author Greg Winiarski

    (@gwin)

    Hi @fayratta,
    sorry for the late reply, I am rarely checking the reviews, I am checking the forum threads daily though.

    Please note that the reCAPTCHA integration is the second line of defense only, we do have some simple anti-spam protection built into WPAdverts but it became inefficient lately as the spambots’ ability to fill the forms improved.

    To resolve the problem for free users i released today a 1.5.5 update that addresses the spam submissions, you can check the blog post here https://wpadverts.com/doc/spam-submissions/, but in short, there are 2 features that will work in the background to catch the spam and one that you can configure.

    BTW. Before the update, we also had some methods (other than reCAPTCHA) to stop the spam, for example, you could make the [adverts_add] shortcode available to registered users only or using the free plugins for stopping spam (now the free plugins are integrated into WPAdverts).

    You can read more about it here https://wpadverts.com/doc/spam-submissions/ although i will be soon updating this article to reflect changes in version 1.5.5.

    Thread Starter fayratta

    (@fayratta)

    Thanks Greg. I had found the article a few days ago and installed HoneyPot and Time Trap. Those haven’t killed the spam, but have greatly reduced it. I will also configure the Adverts_Add as well and see how that does. I’ll also see about changing my stars based on all this and your answer. It’s much appreciated!

    Plugin Author Greg Winiarski

    (@gwin)

    Hi @fayratta,
    thanks for the feedback, can you let me know how much less spam is now coming in (i do not need actual numbers just rough percentage)?

    I was actually hoping for a close to 100% success rate.

    If still rather large amounts of spam are going in then i will consider making the reCAPTCHA integration free to all users, if you would like to give it a try you can contact me at https://wpadverts.com/contact/

    BTW. Have you tried limiting the number of allowed links in the content? You can do that from wp-admin / Classifieds / Options / Core / Spam panel, or do the spam submissions do not include any links?

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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