{"id":354,"date":"2010-03-20T15:40:24","date_gmt":"2010-03-20T19:40:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/acro.net\/blog\/?p=354"},"modified":"2010-03-20T16:08:10","modified_gmt":"2010-03-20T20:08:10","slug":"the-single-most-important-wordpress-plugin-you-will-ever-need","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/acro.net\/blog\/the-single-most-important-wordpress-plugin-you-will-ever-need\/","title":{"rendered":"The single most important WordPress plugin you will ever need"},"content":{"rendered":"

When I sent my first email while in college in the late 80’s, we didn’t even call them such. They were “network messages<\/em>“; few of us had access to the gateway that would send these messages outside of the local network and into the wild unknown. In fact, there was nothing of interest out there, until the early 90’s.<\/p>\n

But enough with these old tales. Roll forward a couple of decades and email is as common as picking up the phone. At times, it’s faster to communicate via email than by phone, as it can be delivered through several media.<\/p>\n

The problem is of course, spam <\/strong>– the sheer amount of junk email that ends up clogging your mailbox. Nowadays, there are several methods to block email spam effectively, including filters and even forwarding through Gmail that seems to catch a lot of it.<\/p>\n

But what about comment spam on blogs?<\/strong><\/p>\n

For blogs that run WordPress, you should enable Akismet as soon as you set up your blog, although unfortunately it doesn’t keep the spammers away; the comments are sent to your spam queue along with several false positives. You still have to go through the queue to read them.<\/p>\n

On a given day, I get 75 to almost 100 spam comments sent to the spam queue. I used to skim through them to see if anything was caught by mistake but after a while it became tedious.<\/p>\n

So I tried installing various captcha plugins that were forcing commentators to enter a jumbled up code into a form field along with their message. Aside from being an extra inconvenience to those wanting to leave a comment, the captchas were cracked in 3 days by various spambots peddling cheap pharmaceuticals, flooding my mailbox like wild jellyfish in an old port’s waters.<\/p>\n

The solution? <\/strong><\/p>\n

The single most important WordPress plugin that will effectively block all spam from ever reaching the queue, is called WP-SpamFree<\/strong><\/a> and it works wonders. It has various parameters to do what you ask it to do; you don’t have to worry about how it does it, but it works.<\/p>\n

Having tested WP-SpamFree at the recent traffic onslaught of DomainGang.com<\/strong><\/a> after a post made Digg’s homepage, the plugin logged no less than 350 spam comments that never made the spam queue. These blind spambots released their scummy digital farts into the air, never reaching the DomainGang.com database. Not a single false positive!<\/p>\n

Download it, install it, and forget about comment spam for good. And while you’re at it, follow me on twitter http:\/\/twitter.com\/acroplex<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When I sent my first email while in college in the late 80’s, we didn’t even call them such. They were “network messages“; few of us had access to the gateway that would send these messages outside of the local network and into the wild unknown. 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