If you have a website, you will have to deal with spammers. They leave no opportunity to attack a website and OpenCart is no exception.
Spammers try to degrade your website by posting spam links, comments, fake registrations, etc. Go through the OpenCart forum once and you will see many users complaining about the spam activities on their website.
Scrapping this wanted traffic is important so that your website’s performance on the search engine is not affected. To help you get rid of spammers, we present you with two modules that could prove to be effective in restricting bots and spammers from entering your website and doing malicious activities.
Before we begin, let’s try to understand a few spam activities that you could witness on your OpenCart website.
Few Spam Activities That You Could Witness on Your Opencart Website
1. Spam Comments
You would often get excited to see too many comments on your blog posts only to realize that they are just spam links and have no relation to the content whatsoever. These irrelevant comments are not only annoying but they also hurt your SEO as they pass on the link juice to the spammers’ websites.
2. Fake Sign-Ups
In this spam activity, bots bombard your website with multiple fake registrations. They take up a lot of storage on your server and intend to slow or harm your website’s performance.
Recommended Read: Two Effective Modules to Keep Away Spammers and Bots from PrestaShop store
How to Prevent Your Opencart Website from Spammers and Bots?
As I said above, we have two extensions specially designed to deal with this. Let’s take a look.
1. OpenCart Spam Blocker
OpenCart Spam Blocker extension lets you block a store visitor by his/her IP address, country, or user agent.
From the back-end, you can specify the IP addresses from which you don’t receive traffic or which you suspect to be sending spam to your website. You can insert multiple IPs at once. Or instead of blocking, you can allow only certain IPs to access your OpenCart store.
Similar to this, you can add nations to your block list if they consistently send you large amounts of spam.
The next feature it has is blocking spammers/bots that are landing on your website from a specific user agent. (Firebox, Chrome, Mozilla, Android, Windows, etc.)
It may happen sometimes that you block a genuine user. This module enables blocked users to submit a request for unblocking to the website’s owner. The admin can track the requests from the back-end and take decisions accordingly.
Knowband OpenCart Block User Extension provides a spam blocker solution. The OpenCart Block User Extension enables the e-merchant to block particular IP addresses, nations, or user agents. The anti-bot solution offered by OpenCart Spam Blocker Extension is a clever technique to stop malicious users from accessing the website, enhancing the shopping experience of the store’s legitimate customers. You have a lot of options with the OpenCart Spam Blocker module to filter out suspected bot traffic in the store. Consequently, the possibility of unwanted threats and spam in the store is eliminated.
Recommended Read: OpenCart Block Bot/User by IP, Country or User Agent Extension – User Manual
2. OpenCart Google reCaptcha
OpenCart Google reCaptcha is the best way to counter fake registrations on your website. It adds a security layer to your website. You can enable reCaptcha on the Login page, Registration Page, Contact Us page and Forgot password page. For each page, you can specify the reCaptcha that you want to set: v2 reCaptcha or v3 reCaptcha.
In contrast to the new reCaptcha (v3), which employs machine learning and extensive risk analysis to distinguish between bots and humans, the old reCaptcha (i.e., v2) is a basic “I am not a robot” checkbox that allows individuals to quickly navigate that particular website. With the OpenCart Google reCaptcha extension from Knowband, your customers may pass the human verification test without providing any additional website inputs. You allow free registration for your users, just like websites like Gmail, Hotmail, Facebook, Twitter, and others. Therefore, it is crucial to safeguard your store’s registration and login process. You may verify that specified actions are actually carried out by real humans and not by automated programmes by using Opencart Google Captcha.
Recommended Read: How to Attract Sellers on OpenCart Marketplace
Final Word
The combat between spammers and websites goes on forever. They will try to spread spam by any means. I am sure these two OpenCart extensions will be extremely beneficial in getting rid of spammers and bots on your website. If you need any kind of assistance with these two modules, feel free to reach out to us at support@knowband.com.
We have a dedicated support team that is always available to aid customers to deliver the best and most effective post-sale support to our customers. Moreover, even on weekends, we continue to fulfil our obligations to customers who need assistance with urgent website problems.
