wordpress captcha to block spam user registrationsRecently infocarnivore.com began gettinginundated with spam user registrations. My site settings were set as such that new users would be registered as ‘contributors’ so that they could post potential content for pending review. I’m always eager to receive new content from quality guest bloggers (find out more about guest blogging at info carnivore) and I regularly publish content from some great authors.

Besides getting a ton of ridiculous spam user registrations I was also being overloaded with pending articles that were nothing but pure garbage. Every day I was needing to purge pending articles and spam users from my site. The number of spam users was progressively increasing, to the point where in the last week when I got feed up and sought out a plugin to resolve this issue I was regularly deleting about 10 spam registrations per day!

The first move I made was to change new users from contributors to subscribers. This at least prevented the spam registrations from submitting content for review. The next step is to prevent the registration of the spam users altogether.

Want to prevent the registration of wordpress spam users?

The plugin I found and the plugin YOU need is Skt NURCaptcha. This brilliant plugin does the job you need it to do. NURCaptcha stands forNew User Register Captcha. The designer of the plugin tells us on the plugin site “I had decided to change preferences in a WordPress powered site so to allow people to freely register as new subscribers. But as soon as this was done, a lot of bot intruders came in and in a blink the site’s pages were infected by some russian (.ru) malware. Then I dug around for some plugin to give me some security on that wide open gate of my site.”

wordpress captcha for new users

The NURCaptcha plugin in action

Apparently no such plugin existed at the time and so came about the birth of Skt NURCaptcha. The WP Plugin is called to action by the “login_form_register” hook. Then a call is made to a Google’s reCaptcha form which is inserted into the WP native registration form. To know more about reCaptcha Safety,go here. With this plugin if someone wants to register on your site a correct responses to the Captcha challenge must be completed.

After installing the plugin you’ll need toget a public and private API key from google’s ReCaptcha serviceand enter those keys into the setup page for the NURCaptcha plugin.

Does it actually work?

Absolutely. Running a captcha on your new user registration screen is solid, and will fool whatever automation bots are currently using to spam your wordpress blog. After running it for a week I am happy to announce that I’ve had ZERO spam user registrations. Is this a plugin you could use? Let us know your experiences with spam wordpress user registrations in the comments below.