CellarWeb Privacy and Security Options

Secure your WP site with common security settings that you can selectively enable. Includes several security and anti-hacking features, plus some customization of your login screen. Disables certain functions/processes that are potential security issues. Can block some comment spam (although our Block Comment Spam plugin https://wordpress.org/plugins/block-comment-spam-bots/ is more effective). Can ncrease memory allocations. Shows your current htaccess file contents with suggestions for improvements, so you can monitor any changes.

NEW FEATURES:
– Optionally adds directives to the WordPress virtual robots.txt file to block site scanning by AI bots. This blocks the use of your site content by those AI agents, such as ChatGPT, OpenAI, Bard, and others. It does not affect search engine scanning or any SEO, nor does it affect the user experience of your site.
– Now shows any hidden plugins (which might be malicious), plus lists all plugins with versions and status (active, inactive).

We use this on all of our managed WordPress sites, as a convenient way to secure the sites without using a bunch of different plugins.

This plugin can be downloaded for free without any paid subscription from the official WordPress repository.

BEGIN – Added by ChatBot Blocker by CellarWeb plugin (Version 1.03)

 # Blocks ChatGPT bot scanning User-agent: GPTBot Disallow: / # Blocks Bard bot scanning User-agent: Bard Disallow: / # Blocks Bing bot scanning User-agent: bingbot-chat/2.0 Disallow: / # Blocks Common Crawl bot scanning User-agent: CCBot Disallow: / # Blocks omgili bot scanning User-agent: Omgili Disallow: / # Blocks omgilibot bot scanning User-agent: Omgili Bot Disallow: / # Blocks Diffbot bot scanning User-agent: Diffbot Disallow: / # Blocks MJ12bot bot scanning User-agent: MJ12bot Disallow: / # Blocks anthropic-ai bot scanning User-agent: anthropic-ai Disallow: / # Blocks ClaudeBot bot scanning User-agent: ClaudeBot Disallow: / # Blocks FacebookBot bot scanning User-agent: FacebookBot Disallow: / # Blocks Google-Extended bot scanning User-agent: Google-Extended Disallow: / # Blocks SentiBot bot scanning User-agent: SentiBot Disallow: / # Blocks sentibot bot scanning User-agent: sentibot Disallow: /<h3>END - Added by ChatBot Blocker by CellarWeb plugin (Version 1.03)</h3> ` 

See additional chatbot agents added in the changelog below.

htaccess Security Settings

• Shows the current htaccess file for review. (Hackers like to change it, so it’s good to take a peek at it now and again.)
• Some suggestions for additional htaccess commands are shown.
• No changes are made to the htaccess file.

Wow! That’s a lot of settings!

Yep. But they are ones that we commonly use in all of our managed WP sites, so putting them into one plugin was easier than doing it manually on every site.

What if I want an additional setting?

Just add a message in the plugin’s support area. We’ll consider it.

Do you have other security-related plugins?

Yep! One of our favorites will block all comment spam – and another that blocks bots from contact forms. It’s very effective. We put it on one site that was getting a lot of comment spam, and now there is none. Not one. And we don’t get any contact form spam on sites that use the technique.

It’s called “Block Comment Spam Bots”, and can be found in the WP plugin repository. And there’s a link to it (and other plugins we’ve done) on this plugin’s Settings/Information page. The Contact Form bot-blocker is called “FormSpammerTrap”, and is available at https://www.FormSpammerTrap.com .

Check out all our plugins at https://cellarweb.com/wordpress-plugins/ .