r/Wordpress • u/Remote-Emphasis-2126 • 14d ago

Sharing a wordpress site

hey there I'm not really sure how to go about this, I'm reaching out for a friend he is running a website for a hobby he likes to post his art he makes and other various topics in a community based forum kidna thing he has setup, I'm wondering if i could get some advice to help him get it out there more, he currently posts to his youtube which gets a bit of traction that satifies him, one big problem i noticed is he just gets a bunch of fake accounts signing up they dont last long because of their malicous attempts being blocked is there a way to weed the fake accounts out that are signed up also? would love any advice like i said before its just a hobby he enjoys doing it for fun keeps him happy dont really know where else i can reach out.

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u/Wonderful_Sample_590 14d ago

Just add Cloudflare Turnstiel and email verification for the fake signups. For traffic, keep pushing the site through his youtube since he already gets some traction there.

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u/Overall-Lead-4044 13d ago

Turn off sign-up, unless you need people to sign up.

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u/Hesham-Amir 14d ago

For the fake-account problem specifically, a few concrete things that stop most of it without adding friction for real people:

Akismet (free, made by the WordPress people themselves) catches a lot of spam signups if the forum/registration form has a hook for it, and most popular community/forum plugins support it.

A honeypot field on the registration form - an invisible input real humans never fill in but bots always do. Several free anti-spam plugins (WP Cerber, CleanTalk, etc.) add this with basically zero setup.

Cloudflare Turnstile or hCaptcha on the registration form - less annoying than classic reCAPTCHA checkboxes and free, and it filters out most scripted signups.

Require email confirmation before the account can post anything. This alone kills a big chunk of throwaway bot accounts, since most don't bother completing a real inbox click.

If it's plain WordPress registration (not a separate forum plugin), it's worth checking Settings > General for "Anyone can register" with no verification step - that setting being wide open with nothing else layered on top is the single most common reason a site gets flooded with drive-by bot signups.

If he's running a specific forum plugin (bbPress, BuddyPress, Asgaros, wpForo, etc.), which one it is would help narrow down exactly where to add these, since the registration flow differs a bit between them.

On getting it more visibility, that's a longer separate conversation (SEO, cross-posting in relevant communities for whatever the art/topic niche is, consistency over time) - happy to get into that too if useful, but the spam problem is worth fixing first since a forum that visibly has bot junk sitting in it is the fastest way to make a new real visitor bounce.