CleanTalk's blog

    Sign up

    Author: Alexander

    • Errors in plugin settings

      Dear costumers!

      At the moment, our anti-spam servers are experiencing increased load, therefore, errors may be displayed in the plugin settings:
      Error occurred while updating SpamFireWall local base
      Error occurred while checking account status. Error: CONNECTION_ERROR
      Error occurred while API key validating. Error: Testing is failed

      We ask you not to worry, this will not affect the operation of the anti-spam service. We are working on this and will release a new version of the WordPress plugin within 12 hours. With decreasing server load, all errors will disappear.

      Thank you!

      Update 02 Feb 2020

      The issue completely solved. All servers are working in normal state. We are sorry for the bad experience and for the inconvenience.

    • Additional email address to receive CleanTalk Reports for all services

      We have expanded the ability to add an additional email address to receive email reports. A new option allows you to send reports for all services provided by CleanTalk.

      This is necessary for customers who care about receiving notifications to other site administrators or webmasters.

      If you want the report to come not only to you but also to your other employees, use this option to add email addresses.

      Learn more, how to grant the rights.

      If you have any questions, you can contact our support team. https://cleantalk.org/my/support/open

    • How Can You Manage Access for Spiders, Crawlers and Other Bots on Your Website? Protecting From Content and Personal Data Parsing

      Every day your website is being visited by different bots, the majority of their visits are invisible to you even in Google Analytics, however, it doesn’t mean that the bots don’t visit your website. Your web server logs can help you with the visit statistics or you can install the CleanTalk Security Plugin so you can see all bot requests in your Security Firewall statistics including all types of bots. To learn more about the CleanTalk Security for websites, please go here: https://cleantalk.org/help/security-features

      Website owners and webmasters try to give full access to web crawlers for indexing their websites. But there are bots that are not needed for the functioning of your website and you don’t use the company services that their bots provide.

      Frequently, the number of bot visits could be higher than the number of real user visits. Aggressive scanning and a lot of questionable visits of bots may be unwanted and can load your webserver or you just don’t want to give information about your website.

      How to Protect Your Website From Content, Personal Data and Black SEO Parsing

      Bad bots not only send spam but they try to hack websites, do parsing and copying content, look for vulnerabilities, can collect any data from websites including email addresses, user names, user contacts and so on. Settings up the file “robots.txt” not always helpful and often useless because such bots can ignore those rules.

      Personal data might be sold afterward and can be used in other types of fraud, spam/flood in mailing lists, phone numbers and etc. Copied information could be published under a different name.

      Price parsing, parsing goods might be used by competitors, pictures of goods might be used on other websites and etc.

      Bots can click ads, links, etc. either on your website or messing with your ads. Or they could try lowering your website index rank by increasing the number of Bounce rate. Going to the website from search results and the length of their visit is very short.

      To block bad bots CleanTalk added a new option Anti-Crawler https://cleantalk.org/help/anti-flood-and-anti-crawler. Official bots will not be blocked by this option such as Yandex, Mail.ru, Baidu. While using this new option a part of automatic bots will be blocked on the second visit.

      Or there is an alternative way when any official service, like MOZ.org for example, that doesn’t have its own IP address range and doesn’t have DNS records for its bots so it’s impossible to identify them, so the Anti-Crawler option will block these bots. To avoid that you can whitelist User-Agents of the bots.

      For our clients who want to restrict access to their websites for such official bots or vice versa who want to allow the bots, we added tools to set up the Anti-Crawler option.

      To control your Personal Lists for the Anti-Crawler option, go to your administrator panel of your website WordPress Dashboard —> Settings —> Anti-Spam by CleanTalk —> Advanced Settings) and enable the option “Block bots by User-Agents”. Our guide is here: https://cleantalk.org/help/filter-ua

      Google bots and Bing bots are whitelisted by default and it can not be changed.

      Here is the current list of the User-Agents of bots:


      Mail.ru
      SEOkicks-Robot
      Sogou Spider
      Applebot
      Pingdom.com Bot
      Akamai Crawler
      Rogerbot – MOZ.org
      FacebookBot
      Twitterbot
      HuaweiWebCatBot
      Pinterest Bot
      GTmetrix
      CloudFlare crawler
      Serpstatbot
      Archive.org_bot
      Alexabot
      Yandex
      Baidu
      AhrefsBot
      DuckDuckGo
      Semrush
      Seznam
      Petalbot
      Wikipedia Crawler
      Rambler Bot
      AspiegelBot – HuaweiWebCatBot

      You can put any bot from the list above to your black or white list.
      As we gather more statistics we will add more User-Agents of bots to the list.

      Even if you don’t plan to use black/white lists for the bots and the option Anti-Crawler is enabled in the CleanTalk plugin, we recommend enabling the option “Block bots by User-Agents” too. The Google bots and the Bing bots will be whitelisted for your website in any case.

      If you have any questions, you can contact our support team. https://cleantalk.org/my/support/open

    • Spam attacks on CleanTalk

      Hello,

      We have to inform you that today we once again have been attacked by spammers who used our email for phishing attack using our email address. Spammers use it to send phishing messages to websites.

    • This December we offer special discounts for our Security service and Uptime monitoring

      We will reduce the price from $20 per year to $9 per year when purchasing a cloud security service and from $15 per year to $9 per year for an Uptime monitoring service.

      Discounts on both services start from 08 December and are valid until December 31, 2021.

      Learn more about all of the security features https://cleantalk.org/help/security-features

      Learn more about Uptime monitoring
      https://cleantalk.org/price-uptime-monitoring

      If you have any questions, you can contact our support team. https://cleantalk.org/my/support/open

      Update. December 28 2020

      Discount for the Security service is valid till January 31, 2021.

      Update. December 12 2020

      Discounts are valid till December 28, 2020.

    • New Options: CleanTalk Anti-Flood and Anti-Crawler

      Hello,

      Recently we added new options for SpamFireWall.
      They are Anti-Flood and Anti-Crawler. They are meant to block different bots. Most of the visiting bots are not being shown in the statistics of Google Analytics so you can’t see the exact number of their visits. Nevertheless, bots can create a big load on your website and be a big part of the overall statistics of visits. They can gather various data about your website, links, pictures, text and so on. More aggressive bots can copy your website information to use it later for themselves.

      Anti-Flood and Anti-Crawler options are intended for blocking unwanted bots, content parsing, shop goods prices parsing or aggressive website scanning bots. Web crawling bots such as Google, Bing, MSN, Yandex, Ahrefs are excluded and will not be blocked.

      Anti-Crawler — is designed for blocking any bots (with the exceptions) on your website. The initial visit launches the checking process whether it’s a bot or a human. If the checking fails then visiting the second page will return a blocking screen. The IP address will be added to the blacklist for 10 minutes and when this time period expires the data about that IP address will be deleted.
      This option helps in blocking any parsing and HTTP DDoS attacks.

      Anti-Flood — is designed for preventing any aggressive behavior of bots (with the exceptions). The option checks how many pages were visited by one IP in 1 minute. If the amount of visited pages exceeds the set threshold then that IP will see a blocking screen. The blocking screen is active for 30 seconds and when this time period expires the IP address will be able to visit the website until it exceeds the threshold again.

      By default, the threshold is set to 10 pages per 1 minute. This number was picked based on the statistics. Usually, a normal visitor does not open 10 pages at once, it’s about 3-4 pages so the threshold is set with a margin.
      You can set your own threshold at any time: https://cleantalk.org/help/anti-flood-and-anti-crawler

      Thank you!

    • How to stop spam on Convertkit and ActiveCampaign form

      We have added anti-spam support for the ConvertKit and ActiveCampaign forms. All CleanTalk Anti-Spam features are available to keep safe your mailing list from spam emails.

      You can protect your spam subscriptions and registrations for spam with using the CleanTalk Anti-Spam plugin and you can download the plugin from the WordPress catalog. To enable spam protection for ConvertKit and ActiveCampaign you need to activate option Protect External Forms.

      Learn more about Spam Protection for Convertkit and ActiveCampaign.

      Let us know if you have any questions
      https://cleantalk.org/my/support

    • The Newest CleanTalk Anti-Spam Updates

      We have strengthened the verification of existing users/comments for spam. Additional parameters were added to the scan which are being taken when checking existing comments and users for spam. Changes to the checking logic have been applied to reduce memory usage.
      https://cleantalk.org/help/users-check

      Implemented white lists to the SpamFireWall feature. White lists only work in plugins released after Jun 01, 2020. Methods for working with the database and generating queries to the database were updated, and as a result query processing time significantly reduced and SpamFireWall accelerated.
      https://cleantalk.org/help/cleantalk-spam-firewall

    • Updates for the anti-spam plugin for OpenCart and Journal 3 theme

      We have released a new version of the anti-spam plugin for OpenCart in which we have added the following updates:

      Added SpamFireWall for OpenCart. Now you can block the most spam active bots until they visit the site.
      Read more https://cleantalk.org/help/cleantalk-spam-firewall

      Added spam protection for Journal 3 theme. One of the most popular themes for OpenCart now has spam protection for all forms except the contact form. At the moment, we have not been able to implement spam protection for the contact form for Journal 3, and we plan to implement it. To protect the Journal 3 contact form, you can use our universal anti-spam plugin.
      How to install universal anti-spam plugin https://cleantalk.org/help/install-uni

      How to install the anti-spam plugin for OpenCart
      https://cleantalk.org/help/install-opencart

      How to update the antispam plugin for OpenCart
      https://cleantalk.org/help/update-opencart

      We are glad and ready to answer your questions.

      If you have any questions, you can contact our support team. https://cleantalk.org/my/support/open

    • Sectigo/Comodo SSL Root Certificate Expiring May 30, 2020

      Hello,

      AddTrust External CA Root that was used to sign Sectigo Certificates expired on May 30, 2020.

      Since you acquired a Sectigo/Comodo Positive SSL Certificate the statement above might be true for you.

      Read more about it here: https://www.ssls.com/knowledgebase/sectigo-root-certificate-expiring-may-30-2020/

      You don’t need to do anything if your website doesn’t use any web applications. When a web application connects to your website via SSL by itself, for example, a payment gateway app that gets server responses about the payment status. (PayPal will not show any errors).

      However, if your website does use web applications then you may see errors in the apps and you have to reinstall the CA Bundle. To do it, follow this guide: https://www.ssls.com/knowledgebase/sectigo-root-certificate-expiring-may-30-2020/

      We apologize for the inconvenience caused.

      We are glad and ready to answer your questions.

      If you have any questions, you can contact our support team. https://cleantalk.org/my/support/open

       
      Thank you!