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Battling Spam

Lesson 49 from: WordPress for Photographers

Justin Seeley

Battling Spam

Lesson 49 from: WordPress for Photographers

Justin Seeley

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Lesson Info

49. Battling Spam

Lessons

Class Trailer

Day 1

1

What Can WordPress Do?

07:49
2

WordPress.com vs WordPress.org

10:41
3

Domains and Hosting

08:14
4

Domains Q&A

10:00
5

Demo: 1-Click Install on HostGator

08:53
6

Audience Q&A

38:03
7

WordPress Dashboard Oveview

32:31
8

WordPress Dashboard: Settings

33:22
9

Audience Q&A

03:42
10

Working with Posts

33:44
11

Working with Pages

30:46
12

Audience Q&A

34:57
13

Using WordPress Plug-ins

44:26
14

WordPress Themes

27:13
15

Final Q&A

04:05

Day 2

16

Managing Your Media

35:20
17

Managing Your Media Q&A

05:48
18

Working with Video

09:39
19

Top 5 Photo Plug-ins

19:57
20

Top 5 Themes for Video

13:56
21

Top 5 Video Plug-ins

10:37
22

Creating a Discussion

09:53
23

Moderating Comments

12:26
24

Creating Ratings and Polls

11:27
25

Purchasing a Theme

17:58
26

Customizing a Theme

08:23
27

Editing Code for Non-Geeks

24:54
28

Customizing Themes Q&A

07:43
29

CSS Crash Course

24:15
30

Using the WordPress Codex

13:13
31

Creating and Using Menus

08:28
32

Lightbox Plugins

13:13
33

WordPress Codex, Menus and Plugins Q&A

08:43
34

General WordPress Q&A

10:17
35

Optimizing Images for the Web in Photoshop

32:30
36

Optimizing Images Q&A

10:56
37

Displaying High Resolution Images on the Web

11:35

Day 3

38

Protecting Images Online

22:06
39

Adding Watermarks

17:56
40

Copywriting Images

08:40
41

SEO 101

24:00
42

Engaging Your Audience

05:26
43

URL Shortening

09:54
44

Exporting/Importing WordPress Data

10:33
45

Backing Up WordPress

13:26
46

Security 101

24:20
47

Spotting Trustworthy Themes/Plugins

24:32
48

Trustworthy Themes/Plugins Q&A

21:13
49

Battling Spam

18:38
50

Dealing with a Hacked Site

15:41
51

Protecting Your Site

10:46
52

Using Web Fonts

24:08
53

Web Fonts Q&A

11:36
54

Thanks + Credits

04:04
55

Monetizing Your Content

24:55
56

Final Q&A

28:31

Lesson Info

Battling Spam

So in this next little section, we're gonna talk about expanding your security. So I'm gonna talk about battling spammers. We talked a little bit about that on day one. We're gonna expand upon that just a tad, and then we're gonna talk about how to block users and I p So if there's people that are really getting on your nerves or spammers that just won't go away, I'm gonna show you how to theoretically get rid of this people. We're gonna go through how to determine whether or not your site has been hacked. There's one big clue. Of course, that would be the fact that you're locked out of it and it looks totally different. We're gonna go through malware scanning. I'm gonna show you a couple different places where you can go to check your site from malware. I put this in their strictly because of the fact that I was attacked a few weeks ago, and I'm going to talk about ways to deal with hack side. I'm gonna walk you through exactly what I did to get my sight back up and running. My method...

might be a little extreme, but it did work All right, then I'm gonna go through protecting your site, things you can do to protect it. And then ways you can protect your RSS feed and all that good stuff too, right? And then after that, I swear we're gonna get the web funds, I swear. I promise. All right. Okay. So one of the things that we have to deal with on a constant basis when we're talking about WordPress is the comments, man, if you've ever started a WordPress site and you haven't gotten an ad for, you know, whatever type of drug or pharmacy or, you know, some Nigerian prince that wants you to buy his condo because he's out of money or whatever it might be, you've gotten that at some point, right? And so, unfortunately, you know, the built in controls for vetting these people from our site is not exactly what it needs to be. So we have to extend that either with a plug in or by banning people altogether here from the site. Um and I don't I try not to ban people if possible. Orban I p's, if possible. I mean, that's number one. It's a tedious process for us. the blogger or the site owner and number two, You know, who knows? You might accidentally type of letter wrong and block your mom. And that would be bad because then she would say, Justin, why have you blocked me from your site? What are you running there that I don't need to see? And so let's take a look at some ways we can about that. I talked about a kiss met earlier in the class. Day one. I believe I talked about a kiss mitt. So if you have not yet installed a kiss meant building. Look for that. It should already be installed in your WordPress installation. It comes with every install of WordPress. You will have to activate it and go get your A P I key and stuff. But let's take a look at this other plug in here. This is called Spam Free WordPress. All right, this is a comment spam blocking plug in, and it claims that it blocks 100% of the automated spam with zero false positives. That's a very bold statement. But my man Todd Todd Lehman that runs this thing. So, uh, Todd, if that's true, my friend rock on for you, but I have used this plug in once or twice on a couple of my blog's. I'm not saying that it blocked everything 100% because I still got some comments that were questionable, you know, But I have used it to some degree of success, which is great. The plug in is pretty easy to work with. If you ask me, there's some feature lists that it goes down here. Okay, some of the ones that make it appealing to me are the fact that that it does not have to use something called capture when people fill out stuff. Because I feel like captures are kind of a pain for a lot of people. And if people have some sort of visual impairment or something like that, captures can be almost impossible for them to work with. And some captures do. And if you're not understanding what captures mean, if you've ever been filling out a form like, let's say you're going to a predominant ticket buying service online, I won't name who you are, but you know you are a person who charges $35 fees if you go to, said site and start filling stuff out to buy a ticket to an event you will get. This little boxes has type in these two words below. You may have to enter in those words three or four times before you actually get them correct. And that's known as a capture. Okay. And so a lot of things make use of capture. Gravity forms, for instance, has captured built into it. And so this plug in here does not use capture. It doesn't. It just works, Um, you know, without having to do that, it does not run on JavaScript, so there's no no extra risk of someone injecting something into a JavaScript file. You know, it doesn't exactly tell how it works. I mean, you don't want to give away all your secrets, but you can see all of the different features that it has and everything like that. It's It's pretty significantly documented everything else. So it's called Spam Free WordPress. Let's go ahead and install it now into my installation. I'm gonna go plug ins and I'll go down to add new. I've already got a kiss meant running, but you know more is always better. Spam free WordPress. Now, if they happen to conflict with one another, you know, that would stink. But I don't think these conflict as far as I know. Let's install it. Okay. There, you and then we can activate the plug in. And so now that is, you know, installed. And underneath the settings tab over here on the left, I get this new thing called spam free WordPress. And when I go into spam free WordPress, you're going to see that it gets a local comment block list. And this is where you can go into the local block west block list. I'll get it right in a minute. Um, and you can block I p addresses. They're stored in the block database. So if you find that there's a spammer or some sort of I p address that keeps getting in, you can actually go in there and you can turn it on and you can start blocking them here. Okay, I p addresses air these things. If you've never seen them before, like 1 92. 68.1 dot one. Place those little things that you know to it. To a nerd, it means the world to somebody else. It's like a bunch of numbers and periods. What to do? Um, in this case, it does tell you that wild cards okay, like this and a wild card just means it has an asterisk, and it does not work. And what this means is why would you use a wild card? A wild card would be So you could cover the gamut of, you know, available I p addresses or something like that. In this case, that does not work. So you'll have to entering manually each I p address that you want to block. You'll also notice here there's remote so you can block remote I ps password form customization. This is a cool one right here because it forces people. Teoh, increase the size of the password. Okay, remove html from comments that way. You know, if people are trying to put HTML like links or code or something like that into your comments, you can turn that on. I like to turn that on. I don't like I mean, it's OK if people link to me generally, but if I'm running somebody else's business site, I'll usually turn this on just because you know, I mean, they can always type out the address, and people can copy and paste it into their address bar. It's not a big deal for people to do that. Ping backs and track backs you can see here this plug in will close ping backs and track backs on all posts and pages. Okay, so if you download this plug in okay, you can download it from their page, and I'm not sure exactly where it is, but it's somewhere on this page, and it's called Disable Ping Backs and track backs, and you can actually are called auto close pings and track backs. If you choose to do that, you can automatically close Ping back to drag race for all your post. We talked about that nest CEO earlier that that's ah, you know, a good thing that enable is paying back on track backs. Does it lend you to some spam issues? Sure, it does every once in a while, but when it comes to ping backs and track backs, it's almost like the old Hollywood rule. No, there's no such thing as bad publicity rights that theoretically, you're still getting the links, so I don't necessarily agree with that one. So I don't I don't use that plug in right there. I do not use that. Okay, You can customize a URL link into the spam free plugging page if you want to share it with others. Basically, that's like saying, you know, I use ah, spam free WordPress. You should, too. So if you want to give them some credit, in other words, it's what that is, right? Uh, right here is well, basically this right here. Uh, if you leave this on, it gives them credit somewhere on your site saying that there, you know that they made this plug in. And that's why your blog's spam free. If you turn that off, you know, they would like for you to donate the papal. It's a free plug in, but they do offer, you know, they do ask for donations and all that good stuff and support your local developers. It's like tip your waitress, right? So there's a good quote when you're finished with all this stuff, you can hit the save changes button and fear. You know this this all goes into effect. And theoretically, your blawg is now free of span and disaster. Yes. Uh, how do you know what I sp's to block when you get comments and I'll go through some of these, there's their I p address right there. So this person has put in lots of stuff about bacon. Good for you. Um um So you can take their I p address and you can plug that in. And so if you get some comments, you know, like click here for a free target gift card or whatever. So that that identifies there not their particular machine, but but there. I s p a counter something, right? It's the I P address that they're using access your site. So theoretically, if they came through on the same I p, they would not be able to get through if you they were not able to post a comment if if you, uh, so enabled. Let's say there's a house full of roommates and one of them's Oh, yeah, leaving some horrible on your site. You block that one, then there there are other roommates won't be able to write. OK, that's what I was wondering, right? And then you know the thing you have to deal with Still, though, I mean, unless you have plug ins like a kiss met in spam free WordPress running it is gonna be very hard to combat span, because there are. You know, if you there was a Dateline special not too long ago about these spam farms in other countries where literally they pay people like a nickel a Knauer or something like that and all they do is sit around and post spam and send out spam emails and send out those fishing things and all that stuff. So you know, when they've got that kind of stuff coming at you I mean, what what the heck are you gonna do? You know, I mean, you've got to put something in place to fight it. Otherwise, you're just gonna be stuck. Uh, I can tell you, for the longest time, I didn't have a spam fighter on my site. And so I was always getting emails and you know, my wife you should get mad at me because I have my phone get notifications whenever I get an email. And so it was dinging, like, all night long, and at first I was like, Yeah, you know, it's because I'm popular. I'm getting all these comments. I'm a block, honey, like, you know, let it go. And then I get up in the morning and it would be like click here for free Cheetos. And I'm like, Oh, crowd like, you know, that's not That's not what I wanted. I thought it was people think in my tutorial was cool. So, uh, you know, putting this stuff in place is very, very important. If you want to completely block, you know, people from within. WordPress right. There is a way through the Codex and they will explain this to you. It's come along thingamajig in here, but there is a way to put this into your dot h t access file that will block people overall. Okay, so you can actually go in. And this actually does support wild cards so you can add that into your thing, and that way you can cover the whole gamut. Now, this is kind of technical, and this does involve editing a file that is serious business if you mess it up. So my suggestion is, if you think you still are having to combat spam or there's malicious people that are trying to get a hold of your side or whatever it might be. Find yourself a Web developer or somebody who can read this and actually understand it. Find yourself a neo who can understand the matrix, in other words, and then go through and, you know, have them set this kind of stuff up. If you can read this and understand it to the point where you know, you can just copy and paste this stuff, that's all. It's there for us to copy and paste. So if you're gonna understand to a point where you can copy and paste it, go ahead. But I urge you significantly, please. If you do not fully understand what you're about to do when you do this, go find someone who does. All right, cause the DOT HD access file is no joke. All right? That thing is pretty important, all right? No, let's go back to a kiss mitt, cause some people might have missed that on day one. I want to make sure that everybody knows how to get a hold of that Number one. It should be in your WordPress install when you install wordpress and so right now I've activated it and I've inserted my A p I key into it. But by default, it will not be activated. So you have to come here and you have to click Activate, just like you went on this. So you click, activate, and then it will warn you to say I need an A p I key. You take that to their website and I told you the other day you can register for free. You can register for, you know, a fee per year for You know, how many sites you want running on, etcetera, and then you plug it in and it just works. You don't have to do anything else. You entering the a p I key, and it's rocking and rolling. Um, you know, most of the time it works, you know, that's what that was. That movie, uh, you know, 70% of the time it works all the time or whatever that anchorman quote was, or 99% of the time it works 70%. I don't in any way. It works pretty freaking good. Okay, Every now and then one will slip by and I'll see like a cologne ad or something in my WordPress side or whatever it might be. And it's an easy fix. You just hit the spam button and from then on out a kiss meant recognizes that and says, OK, I get it. That spam, dude, my bad. And so they just don't let it through anymore. And so, um, you know, using this plug in or a plug in like spam free WordPress. Those are the two that I highly recommend. There are many, many others can. I don't have time to talk about any of the other ones necessarily, but I just want to make you aware of the two that I have used personally and go from there. So you have any questions about blocking spammers or how to get around that we have questions going back to after we came back from where should we start from the top? Tracy Martin asked. What type of hosting service would you recommend to someone that hosts and maintains over 20 sites? Is it worth it to move sites to a VPs service or a reseller Web hosting service rather than just sticking with a given hosting companies Top level regular hosting plan well, 20 sites. Yeah, you might want to think about going V P s V. P s stands for virtual Private Hurst. Virtual private hosting. Okay, that's gonna give you a lot more stability. Lot more up time, probably. And you're probably going to get a lot better support out of the hosting company you're buying it from. If you get a VPs solution, chances are if you're just a single person or single business, you don't need VPs. I personally don't use VPs, but I only have, like, three or four sites okay, for views and many, many sites. Or if you have a ton of traffic in a ton of visitors, it might be time to think about either, you know, dedicated I p or VPs question from Sam Cox Are blocked comments gone forever? Or are they diverted into a queue which can be inspected? Well, you can go in here into your comments. If I go up to the comments section, you can see if you spam them. They go into the Spam folder like this, okay? And so if you trash them, they will go into the trash. It's not until you empty the trash or you empty the spam that they're going forever. Now, if you have a plug in set up like a kiss meant that says, After 14 days delete all spam comments or something like that, they will auto dump once there, dumped out of here or deleted permanently there, they're gone. Kelty would like to know, Can you run spam free WordPress and a kismet at the same time without them conflicting with each other? As far as I know you can. I've never run into any issues with running them both. I run in both on one side. I know for sure. And I never had an issue. I never got Spam. So And Sam had also asked, How quick are you to pull the trigger on blocking individuals or iess peas? If, okay, I've only blocked one or two ever. Okay, Because most of time, my spam software is good enough to catch the actual spam. The only time I've blocked somebody is if they're using my site as a sounding board for their own agenda or their own product. You know, my my site is my site, and I'm using it for promotional purposes of me. My work and everything I'm doing. If somebody's coming there and, like, you know, saying, Hey, come check out my tutorial. Come check out my podcast from Come check out my online workshop or something like that and they just keep doing it. Then, yes, I will prevent you from commenting on my site. Absolutely. Um, if it's a spam comment that keeps going through, I'll pull the trigger real quick and you can tell a spam comment from a real comment. Okay, chances are there's gonna be one defining characteristic in there that's gonna let you know immediately that it's Pam. Some of them are very clever, Okay, some of them, you know, at the very beginning they'll sound like an actual question. But then you look at the email address that registered for it, and it will be like somebody at I make cool toys dot com or something, you know. And then at the bottom of it will be a link to buy a toy or whatever it might be, and so you can just kind of decipher different and you'll learn over time how to spot it. But yeah, I don't pull it real fast on actual people. But on the the ads and stuff like that, I'll pull it instantaneously. Polio would like you did. I don't know if you said this already, but can you please tell how you find the I p. Address of someone? Spamming? Yeah. So when you're looking at comments, thistles, all the comments that are currently pending in my WordPress install right here. And so right underneath, you'll see their name. You'll see there. You know, all this stuff. And so right here is their I p address. Okay, Right there. And so I can select this, and then I can plug that into any one of my spam fighting plug ins to turn it off or to disable it.

Class Materials

bonus material with enrollment

WordpressSlides.pdf
wp_seo_101.pdf

Ratings and Reviews

a Creativelive Student
 

I watched all three days of the course. I am a photographer. The course was titled WordPress for Photographers. Only about 5% of the course was tailored to photographers. Most of the content and discussion was for pro website consultants and bloggers. That aside, Mr. Seeley is so well versed in what he knows well. Imagine sitting in front of the camera for 3 straight days remaining articulate and very professional! The class was really presented for bloggers, not photographers. An example of this is on day 3 where the presenter, after talking about photographers' concerns for an hour or two, said he wanted to transition out of photography into blogging. The class seemed short on the type of content that photographers need. It would have served photographers better if the students present in the studio were all photographers. Discussions on watermarking, photo file size and image theft/copyright infringement showed that Mr. Seeley's background in the needs of photographers is lacking, while his expertise in graphics and web design are VERY impressive. Too much of the class time was devoted to answering narrowly focused tech support questions from people other than photographers. It was a wonderful class for the audience that hijacked it, but it should have been titled and described differently if it was intended for web-blog designers. I really liked the energy, humor, and expertise of Mr. Seeley but the class was too-often off-mission. On day 1, it would have been very productive to show a photographer's WP website that was esthetically beautiful and had all the bells and whistles photographers are looking for. Then explain how you get from nothing to the final website using WordPress. That would have met the needs of pro photographers!

Shannon
 

Justin is an excellent presenter. He's easy to listen to and it's obvious he knows his stuff. As a presenter/trainer, I really appreciated his ability to stick with his outline while he fielded questions, both off and on topic. It takes some balancing to do that. He was good at noting questions that were too far afield and I think he actually answered all of them by the end of the three days. I would definitely attend more classes presented by him. Thanks, Justin and CreativeLIVE.

a Creativelive Student
 

Amazing class! Superb presentation! Justin kept the technical geek-speak to a minimal and made the entire class easy to understand and fun! I think this class should be called Wordpress for the Non-Geek! (As others have said there was not a lot of information specific to photographers, but when it was referenced there was great examples and information provided!)

Student Work

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