New "Users" Registering Themselves on My Blog?

  • I recently started my first WordPress site. Two questions:

    1. Almost daily, I get notifications that someone has registered him/herself as a new “User” on my site. I never know the people so I delete them as Users immediately. How do they do this? How can I prevent it? What do they stand to gain by doing this?

    2. I also am getting lots of bogus blog comments, usually in broken English with really bizarre email addresses, saying how much they like the site, etc etc. I know this is spam, so I delete the comments immediately. What do these folks stand to gain by leaving these ridiculous blog comments? How can they be blocked? (I mark them as “Spam” before deleting, so I’m hoping that helps prevent them from returning.)

    Any help appreciated.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)

  • Settings->General – turn off “Anyone Can Register”. No more public registrations. Now only you can create new users and there won’t be anymore “public” registrations.

    Hi, William. I don’t know about your first question, but for the second, I was also getting a lot of spam, etc. I was able to resolve it by acquiring the Akismet app.

    Thread Starter williamkwp

    (@williamkwp)

    Bemdesign — thank you for that Settings info. “Anyone can register” was checked, but I have unchecked it. Thank you!

    Modernart1 — I’ve read about the Akismet app but didn’t want to spend the money. But if you’ve had good success with it I’ll go ahead and give it a try. Thank you for that recommendation!

    Akismet is free. When you get to the payment screen, you drag the slider to $0 and it’ll give it to you for free. That’s just a donation.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
  • The topic ‘New "Users" Registering Themselves on My Blog?’ is closed to new replies.