How to Stop Spam Registrations on your WordPress Membership Site

 

 For most blogs, comment spam is the biggest issue they have to deal with. This is why you will find numerous articles floating around the web on how to combat comment spam in WordPress. Rarely do you find anything about preventing spam registration in WordPress. For sites with free membership options, spam registrations can become a major problem. In this article, we will show you how to stop spam registrations on your WordPress membership site.

First thing you need to do is install and activate the Stop Spammer Registrations plugin. Once activated, Go to Settings » Stop Spammers. This is the plugin’s configuration page.

Stop Spammer Registrations is a powerful WordPress plugin which aggressively monitors your website for suspicious spam activity. Before saving the settings, press the “Test IP” button to check that your IP is clean and white-listed. After that review the settings below.

The plugin monitors your website using a combination of anti-spam techniques. It uses Stop Forum Spam’s database to check IP addresses of users on your site. It is a huge database which is actively maintained by collecting data from thousands of sites from around the globe. This is a quick way to catch a spamming IP or email address. It also uses the Honeypot API, Botscout API, and WordPress API. The WordPress API key is the same key you used with Akismet. Whether or not you are using Akismet, you can still use the WordPress API with this plugin.

If you feel that plugin is being too aggressive on users, then you have the option to selectively choose the events where you would like the plugin to check for suspicious activity:

There is a small chance that sometimes this plugin would lock you out of your own site. If this happens the simplest solution is to connect to your site through FTP and rename the plugin file from stop-spammer-registrations.php to stop-spammer-registrations.locked. Access wp-admin and WordPress will automatically deactivate the plugin for you.
WordPress is a great tool to build online communities, do not let the spammers stop you from creating and building your sites. On our videos site, we are using Sucuri which takes care of this and much more. Here are 5 reasons why we use Sucuri to improve our site security.