SPAM Protection

SPAM Protection Features

Spam is a common phenomenon that we all struggle with in our everyday lives. Spam emails, phone calls, messages can all get a bit irritating and when you are into an online business, the inherent risk of becoming the victim of web spam risk increases. Small malignant programs–spam bots–might attack your knowledge base and flood fake information (registrations, comments, subscriptions) into your knowledge base. PHPKB knowledge management software provides spam protection to your knowledge base through different anti spam techniques.

How spam bots affect your knowledge base?

Spam bots are automated computer programs that are built to find form code on your knowledge base and submit fake information like spam messages to your forms. Spam bot attacks like email spam etc, significantly damage your reputation and reduce your delivery rates.

Spam bots affect your knowledge base in following ways:

Spammed Subscriptions

Fake subscriptions in your knowledge base would increase in spam complaints, bounces and unsubscribes, and decreased open rates. Spam bots generally use real email addresses without the owner's permission or knowledge and that results in junk email in users inbox. This leads to low open rates which shows that your recipients are not engaged with you, your brand, or your content. Lack of engagement is a factor in the delivery of future emails, and can even lead to your messages being blocked and increased bounce resulting in a mail server rejecting or blocking your emails entirely.

Spam Comments

Illegitimate comments would engage all your users (new or old) in filtering the good content which will annoy them and may even stop them visiting your knowledge base altogether, affecting your brand reputation and revenue.

Spam Sign-ups

Fake Sign-ups are capable of making it a task for the businesses to reach out to their genuine customers, resulting in an attack on its own brand image.

Spam Tickets

Spam bots can generate fake support requests resulting in unwanted emails for customer support executives, which would engage them unnecessarily in addressing queries that will not yield any profit to company.

Slowing Down Knowledge Base Performance

Unwanted bot traffic can slow down your knowledge base and increase bandwidth costs. When millions of bots spam your knowledge base with requests, your knowledge base takes longer to load. Slow pages frustrate users which can affect your brand image as your users may go to competitors’ websites.

In conclusion, spam impacts the credibility of your business, and eventually hurts user retention.

How PHPKB can stop spam from reaching your knowledge base?

PHPKB has built in spam filter tools that you can use to fight spam in your knowledge base.

CAPTCHA

To reduce the spam registrations and feedbacks, you can enable anti-spam protection "CAPTCHA" in PHPKB admin section. CAPTCHA is used to differentiate humans from bots and the PHPKB CAPTCHA scheme uses distorted characteristics that humans can recognise, but automated scripts will face difficulties in recognizing.

You can either choose 'Default' to enable Image CAPTCHA or 'reCAPTCHA' to enable Google's free service that protects your knowledge base from spammers. PHPKB knowledge management software offers Google's reCAPTCHA v3 for better SPAM protection in its new release.

Double Opt-In Process

Double opt-in is a way of verifying the email id, by confirming the link sent in the email message to the user’s email address. In PHPKB, you can avoid spammers from creating fake sign-ups by enabling the email verification for user registration.

Honeypot Anti-Spam

PHPKB adds the hidden fields forms such as sign-up, contact and subscription that humans cannot see. Spam bots are likely to fill all the fields, including the hidden one, alerting PHPKB for spam filtering creating no inconvenience to users.

Manual Creation of Member Accounts

PHPKB offers an even more secure method of user registration, you can opt for manual creation of user accounts. This creation method can be very useful in construction of an internal knowledge base where you want to set the accounts for your internal staff. You can even notify the member about creation by sending mail on his e-mail account.

IP Address Restriction

PHPKB knowledge base software you to limit the access of your knowledge base on the basis of "IP Address Restriction" i.e. whitelist blacklist some IPs. You can either block some IP addresses from accessing the knowledge base or can allow access to certain IP addresses.

• Blocked IPs: If you see suspicious activity coming from some IP addresses, you can prepare a block list of those and blacklist them from accessing your site entirely to ensure it will not send any more spam.
• Allowed IPs: If you have a limited set of users who can access your knowledge base, you can specify their IP addresses in "Allowed IPs" setting and filter out the rest to reduce the spam activity. The setting is very useful for companies who use the PHPKB knowledge base for internal use.

Maximum Login Attempts

PHPKB allows you to set number of login attempts left for the user in case CAPTCHA code is left empty or filled invalid, thus providing very good protection against unauthorized access.