Hello Paulalford,
WordPress has great built in functionality on the admin dashboard that can usually help solve a lot of these problems. The safest way to handle what you are looking for would be to log in as the admin and click –> Settings then click –> Discussion. Within the discussion settings there will be many options but to make WordPress do what you are wanting I found these settings to be most helpful.
http://i40.tinypic.com/v7ehbm.jpg
After you have enabled those settings, here is a great plugin to add captcha’s to prevent spam and bots within the comments.
http://wordpress.org/plugins/si-captcha-for-wordpress/
This plugin has great documentation and screenshots to help get you on your way.
I hope this helps solve your problems, let me know if you have any further questions.
Have a great day,
Jameson Nuss
Thanks Jameson
I have the “anyone can register” checked and now getting spam registrations – within hours. Here is the kind of stuff I am getting…z34b19ry0 for username. I am getting about 1 or 2 a day and I haven’t even opened the site up to the public yet. So this is not going to be fun.
The captcha only helps the “contact form” not the registration or comments.
http://www.wpbeginner.com/plugins/how-to-stop-spam-registrations-on-your-wordpress-membership-site/
Also, use Akismet if you haven’t already. It will not help for registrations, but it murders comment spammers
Thanks Evan.
Being a beginner, I am only trusting plugins from WPress.org but I didn’t see a plugin for Registration on WPress.org so guess I keep getting registration spams.
I do have Akismet installed and running, but that wont help registration
Wait just to be clear this plugin is on .org. WP Beginner just had a tutorial I thought you might find useful.
http://wordpress.org/plugins/stop-spammer-registrations-plugin/
As an aside, only trusting plugins from WordPress.org may or may not produce what you intended. There are lots of plugins out there, some more awesome than others. You may want to think about something to supplement that strategy – paying attention to what trusted developers are saying, for instance, or getting in touch with your webhost if they specialize in WordPress. It’s good that you’re being careful. And the plugin I mentioned is on the repository, so it should be okay on your end, I think. But as a general rule, only trusting the repository may not give you the most bang for your buck. There’s a lot of good and bad in there. Going to trustworthy sources for recommendations may be more helpful, even if sometimes they recommend something that isn’t available from WP’s plugin repository (Gravity Forms, for example… great plugin… not available there)
