Preventing Wordpress Comment Spam with reCAPTCHA @ Pack Web Hosting

Submitted by Admin on 10/Sep/2012 16:35

Any Wordpress webmaster is all to familiar with Spam/Bogus comments that are posted on blog posts or Wordpress pages. Problem is more accentuated with the automated bots/malware/viruses, which typically can post thousands of Spam comments on any website in a given day. One way to manage this undesired activity is to totaly turn-off comment system is Wordpress. Other way is to moderate every comment. Both these options can be set from within Wordpress Admin Section. Former approach is undesired on a dynamic or an engaing website. While the later approach is only usable to the point where number of comments are manually manageable. It totally fails when comments are being posted by bots etc.

One ingenious method to deal with this problem is to use Captcha system. And reCAPTCHA (a Google Powered Service) is amongst the best among the available Captcha Systems. It provides tough patterns which are difficult for bots to read, but easy for human beings. Also it provide an Audio output, other than normal visual pattern. And the best part is, there is already a Wordpress's reCAPTCHA plugin.

To setup, reCAPTCHA plugin,

Download a set of public/private keys from recaptcha.net . Since its a Google Service, you can use Google/Gmail credentials, to sign-in and download the keys. Remember - public key is for communication between the Browser and the Webserver, while private key is for communication between Webserver and reCAPTCHA's system.
Next, download the plugin itself from http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-recaptcha/ . Unzipping the content of the downloaded Zip file, the full archive would go into wp-recaptcha folder. This needs to be put into wp-content/plugins folder. reCAPTCHA plugin can be enabled from Plugins Section of Wordpress admin area. There one need to paste in the public/private keys downloaded in step 1.

Download/acquiring Public/Private keys from recaptcha.net