If you’re hosting your own social networking component on your WordPress website, you know that social networking platforms host any number and type of personalities, each providing their own User Generated Content (“UGC”). Of course, some content contributors stay within the boundaries of civility, and make life easy for everyone.
Then there are those dreaded lots — the haters, the foul mouths, the spammers, the “content bullies,” and those who can only express themselves using language or images you may not find suitable for your site. To help you take care of those user/abusers, below are ten WordPress plugins we here at ‘corePHP’ recommend to make your life as a content moderator easier.
Yes, unwanted content hurts your page
Spam and profanity drag down your Google generated SEO rankings. It drives away new and regular visitors both, and thereby tanks the productivity of your page, and products. So when operating on such a public platform, it is tremendously important to maintain the content of your page quite vigilantly. However, doing so on a social networking site manually may seem a near impossible task. Thankfully, there are a number of UGC moderation plug-ins to help you weed out unwelcome input with minimum effort, and maximum precision.
- Buddypress moderation – As mentioned above, manually weeding out unwanted content on a social networking site is like looking for a needle in the haystack, but Buddypress moderation simplifies this process greatly. This plug-in utilizes the crowdsourcing method to help site administrators locate objectionable contents. Then, it adds links to flag them in the site. The administrators can view all such reported matters in an organized table and take appropriate actions.
- WP Content Filter – This plug-in filters content intelligently as it doesn’t target content blindly based on a few flagged words, it checks the entire content and context. It can display the beginning and ending letters of a flagged word and hide the rest.
- Defensio Anti-spam – A dual protection provider, Defensio tackles both spam and profanities in the contents. But it is not compatible with other forms of spam blockers; hence for proper functioning of Defensio you’ll have to deactivate the other such plug-ins.
- Akismet Anti-spam– A great spam remover for WordPress and one of the most popularly downloaded plugins, Akismet comes free of charge for small platforms. However, if you have Defensio, you’ll have to let go of Akismet as they are incompatible.
-  WebPurify Profanity Filter – This plug-in comes with its own set of automatically operating black listed words, to which you can add some more if you wish. Further being multilingual in its operation it filters contents more effectively.
- Word Replacer – This allows you to custom make your own black list and provide replacement words for them, and once you’ve customized your list it operates automatically on any part of the page you choose.
- Spam Free WordPress – As pointed out by the name itself, this plugin helps root out all spammers and can even blacklist IP addresses. The automatic function option is a real time saver for all.
- Word Filter Plus – Similar in function as the Word Replacer, the Word filter plus allows you to create replacement content for the profane ones, once saved and set to function it scans for all matching contents and changes them.
- Growmap Anti Spambot – A great plugin for combating spambot, Growmap has one of the best ratings in business. But, it lacks Akismet’s option of checking human spammers and pingbacks.
- WP-reCAPTCHA WordPress – Known for keeping in check automated spam and objectionable users in sites like Google and FB, this plug-in utilizes stringent confirmation process to weed out spambots.
These are some of the most important popular UGC User Generated Content moderation plug-ins for WordPress available on the market today, and a great help against spam, profanity and unwelcome link-backs.
