How to reduce blog and other SPAM on Elgg by
adding meta name rel="nofollow, akismet and robots.txt
As I'm playing with
Elgg - free social network these days,
I've been stuck with my newly established elgg based social network
gets high amounts of spam via the elgg blog on
my MockATeacher - Student Share Files
network
I've researched on how I can reduce the amounts of spam the site
gets and I've found few ways for that, let me elaborate on
that:
First I've been reading for a while about
izap,izap-ecommerce,
izap-videos, however my experience with my tests with this ones
were not good, thus i won't recommend this plugins to any elgg
administrator.
Further on I've installed the
elgg Akismet plugin which by
the way is very easy to install (just place and unzip the plugin in
elgg based website's
mod/ directory ).
A quick elgg Akismet configuration is also necessary in order to
config go to:
Administration -> Tool Administration -> Akismet
[Settings]
All necessary to place in the Akismet [Settings] field is just an
akismet, key. I personally have placed my old Akismet obtained key
for my wordpress blog installation and therefore I skipped the long
and time wasting process of issuing a new API key for
Akismet.
Nevertheless if you don't have an Akismet API key already you will
have to go
Akismet.com and sign up for a new user and a
key.
After installing the akismet.
Moving on with the available anti-spam plugins for elgg, I've the
antispammer-for-elgg plugin. The installation went smoothly,
however I needed a special API key for the plugin which I couldn't
issue.
There were some instructions on how to obtain the
antispammer-for-elgg API Key in order to start using the plugin by
registering first to some forum called
stopforumspam.com but
even though I've registed in the forum and followed the
instructions the forum seems not to allow me to login and therefore
I couldn't issue myself an API Key :(
The problem is not described on Elgg's website and I do suppose
many other elgg enthusiasts have been stucked into the same
can't issue antispammer-for-elgg API key problem !
Next I've stubmled upon some very nice suggestions on how to
decrease the amount of spam by equipping the elgg based website
installation with the following
robots.txt file:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /pg/admin/
Disallow: /account/forgotten_password.php
Disallow: /_css
Disallow: /_graphics
Disallow: /account
Disallow: /admin
Disallow: /engine
Disallow: /languages
Disallow: /service
Disallow: /settings
Disallow: /simplecache
Disallow: /vendors
The file needs to be placed in the main directory root of the elgg
installation and will instruct:
Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask Jeeves and Yandex crawlers not to crawl
and index the above list of directories.
I've also red online some interesting suggestions to use the
<meta robots rel="nofollow> in order to instruct GoogleBot
and the rest of the search engine crawlers not to follow the spam
links which appear on spammer user blogs and video links.
To implement the rel="nofollow meta in my elgg installation
I used the elgg plugin called Metatag_Manager
Metatag manager is ultra easy to install and is installed via the
regular elgg installation procedure by placing and unarchiving in
mod/ dir
The plugin is lacking a good documentation as with many of the Elgg
plugins so it took me a while until I realize how can I Set it
up
Thanksfully finally I found that the Metatag Manager plugin
configuration is located in:
Administration -> Site Administration
On the Site Administration page you will notice the Robots and
Author empty fields.
Now to instruct elgg to show <meta content="nofollow"
rel="nofollow"> to all your elgg based website pages (including
the user blogs simply fill in the
Robots field:
Robots
nofollow
Press the save button and you're done the
rel="nofollow"
will appear on every elgg generated page and hopefully your social
network search engines pagerank will hop up.
I have to say that by so far
Elgg is missing a serious
anti-spam protection support and the developers should work in that
direction to make this awesome project a bit more usable.
I've also noticed there is also a commercial (paid) plugin for Elgg
called
PluginLotto which appears to be a promising one but
since it costs money and I can't afford the fee I have no
observations on it.
It would be nice if somebody could share if it's an usable one and
it worths the money.