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    Category: News and Updates

    • New option. Settings templates

      New option. Settings templates

      Dear customers, we are pleased to present you a new option that simplifies management settings if you have a lot of sites. CleanTalk allows you to create templates for the control panel and plugin settings.

      Templates for the control panel settings

      If you need the same site settings in the control panel, you can select the site whose settings you want to apply to all other sites and create a template based on it. Next, you can apply this template to one, all or several sites and the control panel settings will be applied to the selected sites.

      You can also set a default template and this template will be automatically applied to all new sites that you add to the service control panel.

      You can create several templates and apply the desired template when adding a new site. You can see detailed instructions on how to use control panel templates here https://cleantalk.org/help/dashboard-template

      Templates for Anti-Spam and Security plugins

      A new Import/Export settings option has been added to the plugin. With this option, you can create a plugin settings template and transfer the settings to your other site. When installing the plugin on a new site, you can import settings from an existing template. Import/Export option works only in the WordPress plugin.

      You can add control panel settings and site settings to one template and apply them to multiple sites at the same time, or set a default template.

      You can see detailed instructions on how to use plugin templates here
      https://cleantalk.org/help/plugin-template

      If you have any questions, add a comment and we will be happy to help you.

    • Country Blocking. How to block access to your site from certain countries.

      If you are the owner of a web site, then by default it is available for the entire planet. Many websites are simply not relevant to people in other countries. Thus, you should not expect significant traffic from them for granted.

      If you notice that there are requests to your site from a particular country for which your content is insignificant or you just want to deny access to your website from one or more countries, you can easily use the CleanTalk services.

      Most of the visits to the site are various bots, brute-force attempts, vulnerability scanners and content, products and prices, why not block access to my site from China if it is targeted at users from the USA? Sometimes the danger is greater than the occasional visitor from Pakistan, Iran or Côte d’Ivoire.

      3 types of blocking by country

      CleanTalk provides 3 different types of blocking users by country:

      • Anti-Spam
      • SpamFireWall
      • Security FireWall(Only WordPress)

      Anti-Spam

      Blocking by country using Anti-Spam service allows you to block only comments/registrations and any POST requests on the site from users from certain countries. The site will be available for visitors and they can view it, but will not be able to leave a comment. It will be useful to block spam sent manually and some types of online threats (SQL injections) from these IP addresses. How to use Black/White lists for Anti-Spam service.

      SpamFireWall

      Blocking traffic by country using Spam FireWall allows you to partially block access to the site for the IP addresses of specific countries. All visitors from the blocked country will be given a special page, while ordinary users will be able to go through it and be able to view the site, comment and register, but bots will not be able to go through this page. This option is useful because it can significantly reduce the load on the site, since all POST/GET requests will be blocked and the site will not execute scripts for these requests, the blocking page almost does not consume any server resources. It can be used to block brute force attacks, vulnerability scanners, various bots, as well as to temporarily block traffic in some types of DoS attacks, when attackers send thousands of HTTP requests to the site, reduce the likelihood of hacking the site. How to use the Spam FireWall BlackList.

      If you need to block comments and registrations for this country too, then use country blocking for Anti-Spam service.

      WordPress Security FireWall

      WordPress Security FireWall – tightly blocks access to the site for blocked countries. At the same time, all requests to the site will be blocked and visitors from these countries will not be able to go to the site pages. A blocking page will be displayed to visitors. This type of blocking will be useful to prevent all types of attacks on the web site via HTTP / HTTPS. How to use WordPress Security FireWall.

      For all types of blocks requests are logged and available in the Dashboard for further analysis. All types of blocking allow to reduce the load on the site/server and block attacks on the site.

      For most websites, we recommend blocking only problematic countries that have a large number of spam, brute force attacks, generate a large number of 404 errors on the website, or pose other security threats to your website. We also recommend that you review your block lists regularly.

      For search bots Google, Bing, Yahoo, Baidu, MSN, Yandex and etc. we have made exceptions and they will not be blocked. Also, if you enter the IP address or network in the white list, this entry will have priority and requests will be skipped.

      In addition to blocking by country, each type can use your personal lists to block individual IP addresses or IP networks.

      How to identify the countries with the most spam activity on your site?

      It is enough to go to the CleanTalk dashboard and to see the block with the spam attack map and Top Spam Requests statistics.

      You can also view general statistics on spam attacks https://cleantalk.org/spam-stats

      You can see data on website visitors by country in Google Analytics statistics.

      We will be happy to answer your questions. Leave a comment below or create a private ticket.

      Thank you!

    • Update to block messages by language

      We have added Cyrillic languages to the blacklist. So, if you don’t expect a comment on your website from Cyrillic languages you will be able to block all messages that contain Cyrillic symbols.

      At the moment, the blacklist of languages allows adding for blocking the next languages:

      • Chinese
      • Korean
      • Japanese
      • Hindi
      • Arabic
      • Cyrillic

      CleanTalk informs you about the occurrence of an opportunity to manage personal black/white lists. You can view, add, and delete their items in the Control Panel. You can add languages to the blacklist in dashboard CleanTalk -> Black&White lists or use the link https://cleantalk.org/my/show_private.

      If you have any questions, we will be happy to help you.
      You can leave a comment below or create a private ticket here.

    • Real-Time Email Address Existence Validation

      Real-Time Email Address Existence Validation

      Today we launched a new and important parameter to evaluate spambots. According to our statistics, almost 30% of all spam requests are made with fake email addresses, i.e. such addresses do not exist.

      Previously, we could only check the existence of emails after the fact and use these data in the future; now we have started checking emails in real-time.

      This new feature of CleanTalk grants the ability to check email addresses for existence in real-time.

      Non-existing email addresses also entail several other problems for website owners:
      • You can never contact them by email,
      • The client will never receive any notifications from you (account activation letter, password recovery, email distribution, notifications, etc.),
      • If you use email marketing for your clients, then a large number of nonexistent emails in the mailing list may result in your IP address being added to various blacklists of email servers.

      The anti-spam service will block all requests with not real email addresses.
      You can control such requests in the anti-spam dashboard, non-existent emails will have the “Fake email” status.

      Checking emails for existence is available for all anti-spam plugins and is included in the standard package.

      Update 05/23/2022

      Encrypted SMTP support has been added,

      Spam filtering service improved

      You can leave a comment below or create a private ticket here.
      We will be happy to answer your questions.
      How to install CleanTalk Anti-Spam on your website.
      Create an account or log in.
      Thank you!

    • Getting event notification on your website

      Sometimes, you want to know what is happening on your website, maybe you want to be informed when any messages are sent and were it blocked or allowed by CleanTalk Anti-Spam.

      We added a new feature to help you control for messages from your customers.

      It allows you to add a notification with some parameters:

      • Website — what website you want to receive event notifications from
      • Type of Event — what events you want to see in the notifications (Allowed, Denied, All Events)
      • Method — select where notifications should go to (E-mail or URL)
      • Periodicity (for e-mail method) — how often do you want to receive notifications (Immediately, Every hour, Every 2 hours, Every 4 hours)
      • URL (for URL method) — input your link if you chose URL option in the previous step (JSON format)

      Learn how you can set up events or change your settings.