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Miscellaneous

My WordPress Contact Form Was Drowning Me With Spam Until I Got CleanTalk

I want to share a WordPress plugin that made a huge difference for me. I was getting spammed via my contact form many times every day and it was getting very frustrating. I absolutely hate spammers and needed to find a solution that could be installed by a non-technical person.

I started by searching on the new WordPress plugins page for “contact us form” and started reading. I thought I would need to get a new contact form with some kind of security mechanism like CAPTCHA.

I put a lot of emphasis on number of installs and reviews. A ways down the list I found “Spam protection, Anti-Spam, FireWall by CleanTalk” and started reading the details. CleanTalk’s own website is linked to here.

They were at 2,861 reviews with five stars (that’s a heck of a feat to pull off all by itself) and 2,646 of them were five stars. The plugin also had over 200,000 installs. A plugin can’t get scores like that unless it actually works.

The following bulleted list is off the WordPress plugin page:

Anti-Spam features

  • Stops spam comments.
  • Stops spam registrations.
  • Stops spam contact emails.
  • Stops spam orders.
  • Stops spam bookings.
  • Stops spam subscriptions.
  • Stops spam surveys, polls.
  • Stops spam in widgets.
  • Stops spam in WooCommerce.
  • Real-time email validation. Is email real or Not.
  • Checks and removes the existing spam comments and spam users.
  • Compatible with mobile users and devices.
  • Compatible with General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) (EU).
  • Blocking disposable & temporary emails.
  • No Spam – No Google Penalties. Give your SEO boost.
  • Mobile friendly Anti Spam & FireWall.
  • Stops spam in Search Form.
  • Disable comments.
  • Spam FireWall: Anti-Flood.
  • Spam FireWall: Anti-Crawler.
  • Hide «Website» field for comments.
  • Block messages by languages, countries, networks and stop words.
  • Email Address Encoder – protection for email addresses published on your site.

So, I installed the plug-in and in the settings page, told it to automatically get the key. That was pretty much all I had to do and it started working.

Wow… the spam instantly went away and that was a week ago. What a relief. Now, when I get a contact form email, it really is a customer and not a single spam has snuck through since.

I was so relieved I immediately paid for the plugin for both my blog and WooCommerce sites (yes, I run two separate instances). It was my way of saying thank you — all the bogus spam was very frustrating.

If you have a WordPress site, are drowning in spam and want a simple and very effective way to get rid of spam — get CleanTalk.

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