Magento is among the most popular CMS and e-commerce platforms in the world. You can kickstart your own online store with Magento in minutes, if not seconds. But once your store is up and running, you need to protect it from spammers. The bad guys who spam the internet intentionally in the hope of making a profit. If they hit your website, then it’s quite painful to get rid of them. Therefore, you must take protective measures to keep them at bay. In this article, we’ll show you how to prevent spam registrations on your Magento e-commerce store.
Spamming vs Hacking
Before going any further, it’s important that you have clarity over spamming and hacking – both of which are two different concepts, unfortunately used interchangeably. If you’re already familiar with the differences, you’re free to skip this section.
Hackers are those bad people who manipulate the codes of your website to either steal information or destroy something. In technical terms, they gain unauthorized access to your Magento store and navigate into sections like admin or plugins store where they are not supposed to be in. Once there, they can carry out dangerous operations.
Spammers on the other hand are those villains who leave comments or unsolicited messages on your website, majority of whom are links pointing to other websites. The main objective is to drive traffic onto their own store by piggybacking on your audience. Thus, they do not mess with codes, but rather attack by registering on your website as a user and then go on a comment rampage.
Therefore, to prevent spam from your Magento store, hacking measures will be ineffective and vice versa. Spamming is also easier to combat and control than hacking.
How to Prevent Spam Accounts?
When taking protective measures against spammers, it’s best to prevent them from registration rather than removing them manually. Here are the 5 best ways you can incorporate:
Use Magento Captcha
The first thing you need to do is use captcha. This will give you protection against automated registration bots. These bots are designed to register on your Magento store automatically. But since captcha requires manual intervention, bots will find it hard to solve these. Therefore, they won’t be able to register on your store.
You can enable the Magento’s in-built captcha feature by navigating into Magento Admin>System>Configuration>Customers>Customer Configuration>CAPTCHA. Active the feature and all users will require to solve a captcha before they can register.
Use Google reCaptcha
You can use Google’s reCaptcha service that is even more complex to solve. This will strengthen the protective measures against spammers. You can install it by installing the module and then configuring it. Follow this guide for more.
Use plugins
There are different custom extensions you can use on your Magento store that limit spam users. Some of them are Honey Spam, Restrict Fake Registration, No Spam, etc. Honey Spam adds a hidden field that normal users can’t perceive on their screen. Therefore, if it gets filled, then it’ll be marked as a spam registration. You can find them from the Magento Extensions library.
Block IP addresses
If you find that a certain IP address or IP addresses from a specific area or locality, then you can block them altogether. You can block them using in the .htaccess file on your core folder. Simply open the file and add the below codes:
Another preventative measure you can take is email blacklisting. It has been seen that spam emails often have an extension like @mail.ru, @gmail.ru, @yandex.ru, etc.
If your Magento store has already been affected by spammers, then you have to spot them and remove them manually one by one, which is a tedious process. But it’s important and should be a priority to keep your website spam-free.
Spamming vs Hacking
Before going any further, it’s important that you have clarity over spamming and hacking – both of which are two different concepts, unfortunately used interchangeably. If you’re already familiar with the differences, you’re free to skip this section.
Hackers are those bad people who manipulate the codes of your website to either steal information or destroy something. In technical terms, they gain unauthorized access to your Magento store and navigate into sections like admin or plugins store where they are not supposed to be in. Once there, they can carry out dangerous operations.
Spammers on the other hand are those villains who leave comments or unsolicited messages on your website, majority of whom are links pointing to other websites. The main objective is to drive traffic onto their own store by piggybacking on your audience. Thus, they do not mess with codes, but rather attack by registering on your website as a user and then go on a comment rampage.
Therefore, to prevent spam from your Magento store, hacking measures will be ineffective and vice versa. Spamming is also easier to combat and control than hacking.
How to Prevent Spam Accounts?
When taking protective measures against spammers, it’s best to prevent them from registration rather than removing them manually. Here are the 5 best ways you can incorporate:
Use Magento Captcha
The first thing you need to do is use captcha. This will give you protection against automated registration bots. These bots are designed to register on your Magento store automatically. But since captcha requires manual intervention, bots will find it hard to solve these. Therefore, they won’t be able to register on your store.
You can enable the Magento’s in-built captcha feature by navigating into Magento Admin>System>Configuration>Customers>Customer Configuration>CAPTCHA. Active the feature and all users will require to solve a captcha before they can register.
Use Google reCaptcha
You can use Google’s reCaptcha service that is even more complex to solve. This will strengthen the protective measures against spammers. You can install it by installing the module and then configuring it. Follow this guide for more.
Use plugins
There are different custom extensions you can use on your Magento store that limit spam users. Some of them are Honey Spam, Restrict Fake Registration, No Spam, etc. Honey Spam adds a hidden field that normal users can’t perceive on their screen. Therefore, if it gets filled, then it’ll be marked as a spam registration. You can find them from the Magento Extensions library.
Block IP addresses
If you find that a certain IP address or IP addresses from a specific area or locality, then you can block them altogether. You can block them using in the .htaccess file on your core folder. Simply open the file and add the below codes:
Code:
<Directory>
order deny, allow
deny from 102.15x.1xx.15x
</Directory>If your Magento store has already been affected by spammers, then you have to spot them and remove them manually one by one, which is a tedious process. But it’s important and should be a priority to keep your website spam-free.
