Security

In Apache

In WordPress

Protecting From Spam

I use the Bad Behavior plugin to block spam comments on this site. It works by scanning comments for spam-like traits, but does not actually analyse the comment texts themselves. As an additional measure, I have Agreeable, which adds a checkbox to the comment form asking if the user has read my Website Policies. I want commenters to understand my comment policy, but this also adds an extra layer of protection, as most WordPress sites don’t have this checkbox, and so hopefully most spam bots won’t be programmed to check it.

Vigilance is the best tool to fight spam. I log into the site every day to check for spam comments. So even if something did get through, I would be able to block it rather soon.

Site Stats

From my website policies:

Additionally, this site uses the statistics plugin WP Statistics. I chose this plugin specifically because it does exactly what I need: counts page views for all my pages and displays the results on a graph in the admin menu and a widget on the side of my site. This plugin has the ability to track search engines, referers, browsers, users, IPs, etc, but I am much more impressed that every feature can be selectively enabled or disabled. My site only tracks page hits and the amount of users currently online (judged by if they have viewed a page in the last two minutes). No other information is recorded.

Personally, I don’t see how viewing what each user’s actions on a website does for the administrator. With this plugin, I can tell how popular different pages are, and I can feel some pride at watching that graph of page views over time go up (or so I hope!). Occasionally, I look at the graph and think it would be cool to know who all those people were, but these extra statistics are hardly useful after their novelty wears off.