The iAssistant is an AssistU trained virtual assistant who also writes instructional ebooks about WordPress plugins.
Archive for WordPress Plugins
Spam Fighter – Acceptance Checkbox
Posted by: | CommentsI had never thought about it until Takayuki suggested it, but adding an acceptance checkbox to your custom CF7 form is just one more barrier between you and those wish-they’d-give-up spammers.
Not only does it serve to remind the site visitor of your Terms of Service (you do have one, right?), but that one extra step, that manual clicking in the checkbox, is another way of screening sincere parlay-ers of your website information from those with less than sincere intentions.
This is an example of a quiz and an acceptance checkbox. Nothing that hard for your site visitor, one extra step of protection for you. Most people will appreciate your efforts to prevent spam.
Quiz Those Spammers Out of Business!
Posted by: | CommentsAnother great spam fighter within the Contact Form 7 WordPress plugin is the quiz option. You can require the site visitor to answer math problems (like Google does) or tell you the color of grass. Just one more obstacle for those just-don’t-get-it spammers.
Quizzes are less of a problem for the novice webdesigner because they don’t require the server support that CAPTCHAs do. And, for some of your site visitors, they will be much easier to understand than the strange combination of numbers and letters on a CAPTCHA.
Personally, I like the combination of a quiz and an acceptance checkbox. I’ll talk about that on my next blog post.
Captivating CAPTCHAs
Posted by: | CommentsCAPTCHA, all caps, stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. Hmmm, CAPTCHA is easier to remember. CAPTCHAs, plural, has a small s on the end.
Let’s just focus on what it does: helps prevent spam. A CAPTCHA can be a picture or numbers that must be typed in by the site visitor thus preventing machine spam.
CAPTCHAs are sometimes hard for site visitors to read. For the webmaster, difficulties occur if your webhost doesn’t provide a graphic library to store them.
With Contact Form 7, you, the webdesigner, can choose to use CAPTCHA when you create forms. Before you do, be sure to download the “Really Simple CAPTCHA” plugin, and then activate it.
Next, create a new form with Contact Form 7 and configure it. When you generate the CAPTCHA tag, you can choose from 3 sizes and enter color codes to customize it to your website. Here’s the one I did as an example using a black background and green text:
Very simple to do, thanks to Takayuki Miyoshi, the plugin developer.
Spammers, Contact Form 7, And You
Posted by: | CommentsThose spammers, what do they think they’re going to accomplish by bombarding us with emails? Here’s how to prevent spamming through your online forms that you’ve created with Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7 gives you three options to control spam: CAPTCHA, quizzes, Akismet, or even a combination of the three. Today, I’m going to talk about Akismet. I’ll cover the other two in the next two posts.
Akismet will prevent human spamming. It doesn’t work as well with forms as it does with blog posts, but it is worth using. Akismet will look at the name, email, and URL and make the decision: is or isn’t it spam? Once that decision is made, the site visitor is notified with one of the messages below.
So, that’s one more barrier those spammers have to crawl over to get to your inbox! 
To learn all about Contact Form 7, take a look here.
Tweet Button For WP Posts
Posted by: | CommentsHave you ever seen those big Tweet buttons on the posts of the people you like to read and follow? It is so simple to have one of those on your posts. Look to the right of this paragraph for an example.
To get started:
Search the great WordPress repository for “Big Tweet Button”. This is the plugin website: Big Tweet Button.
Once installed, this is how it will appear on your WP backend plugin page:
The plugin developer, Scott Carter, provides three views to choose from:
That last view that doesn’t show how many times the post has been tweeted comes in handy for posts like mine that haven’t been tweeted much. How about a tweet somebody? *SMILE*
And, how it looks on my blog posts:
A really great, simple, powerful plugin!
