Spam
Like all users of the
Internet you are most likely to experience an unpleasant amount of
spam.
These are unsolicited and unwelcomed adverts that can pop mostly anywhere on
the world wide web.
Unfortunately things have gotten worse when it comes to
spamming.
Spammers have grown more sophisticated which means that most
e-mails and
websites employ
spam detectors however,
spammers can go around these detectors by way of skill,
technology, and determination, finding ways to infiltrate a
website and drown it in
pornography links, phishing schemes, and ridiculous get-rich-quick advertisements into the
inboxes of unwilling, unsuspecting recipients.
Luckily not all is lost. Below are four simple steps designed to significantly reduce the amount of
spam that manages to find its way into your
e-mail inbox.
Install
CAPTCHA on your website forms to foil the bots.
CAPTCHA, which is an abbreviation for "
Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart," calls for people to enter a randomized code in order to submit an online form.
The randomized code is often in the form of distorted, wiggly, or otherwise difficult (but not impossible) to read lettering.
Spam bots, the automatic email producers preferred by today's sophisticated
spammers, can't read the randomized code and are therefore unable to submit the form.
Don't put your email address on your
website. This one move alone can rid you from a lot of
spam.
But the decision has to be carefully considered with other concerns, such as making it easy for site visitors to contact you.
If, like most companies, you decide to include
email addresses on your
website, install
PrivateDaddy.
This free, open-source software conceals your
email address from
spam bots while still making it visible to your human visitors.
Some
website platforms, such as
WordPress, even come with a
plugin you can install right away.
Turn off comments on your
blog.
Again, this isn’t an easy decision because it prohibits your visitors from leaving comments on your site and may cause you to lose vital feedback. But like leaving your
email address off your
website, it can help to reduce
spam in the right circumstances.
If you have a very active community of readers who
post a lot of concrete responses, then the overall value of that community will prevail over the nuisance of any
spam that comes through.
However, if you tend to get a small amount of random comments, chances are that many of them will be
spam.
Turning off comments will help remove
spammers' ability to get through using your
blog.
Unsubscribe from what you don't read.
When you subscribe to a
newsletter, blog, or other form of
online publications, you give that business or organization permission to contact you via
email.
You may not want to receive what they send you, but
technically it isn't
spam.
So they can and most probably will send you updates until you ask them to stop.
In conclusion be smart, thoughtful, and careful when dealing with
spammers and
spam in general.
Devise and execute a plan that allows you to still engage and interact with your visitors, but is still effective in removing or countering any
spam.
