I hope it’s not the same for you, but I saw a dramatic increase of false registrations on my blog for a few days (spambots). I decided to take action and search for a solution.
WordPress is a blogging system which can be extended by plugins. After some investigations, I found and decided to test a plugin called “sabre“.
Developed by a French guy, Sabre stands for “Simple Anti Bot Registration Engine” and offers a lot of nice features. The following list was interesting to me:
- Inclusion of a captcha in the registration form (with complexity fully configurable!)
- Unobstrusive tests to detect if registration is done by humans or not
- Registration blocked if Javascript is unsupported by the browser
- The user can validate his registration by clicking on a link sent by mail
- User must agree with a warning text, disclaimer or general policy note when registrating
(Other features are available, check the full list)
The installation was pretty straight forward as for a WordPress plugin and the configuration took me a few extra minutes. The plugin integrates a statistics module for the dashboard. A few minutes later, some bots were already catched:
My blog has also an OpenID authentication module. Both plugins work in the same time but the generated HTML layout is a bit “strange”. I had to fix some HTML code. Anyway, it’s a great plugin, thanks to the author. Keep up the good work!