For all of us that do not have the cash flow at the moment, here is a list of FREE wp plugins that can help us in between. In order to compare the differences between the free and the plugin check out the sales page here:
I have not used any of these except Better WP Security. I do not know how well these perform with each other. Nor do I know which hosts will have problems with any of these.
However, it is very important to STOP:
Helping our competition identify your blog network
Helping companies like who.is make money off of our data without paying us.
Helping spammers
Helping amateur hackers
Destroying the integrity of our visitor and page view data
Giving wholesale access to countries that are only visiting our sites with bad intentions.
Allowing unlimited access to Google, Bing, Yahoo using our bandwidth.
Working in isolation and join the community against bad neighbors.
Wasting TIME doing each blog by hand, one-by-one.
Here is a list of wordpress plugins that are all free and replace some of the functions that SpyderSpanker does for us:
WordPress › Bluagent WordPress Plugins
WordPress › Stop Spammers WordPress Plugins
WordPress › iThemes Security (formerly Better WP Security) WordPress Plugins
WordPress › iQ Block Country WordPress Plugins
WordPress › Htaccess Secure Files WordPress Plugins
WordPress › WassUp Real Time Analytics WordPress Plugins
MISSING:
Something to throttle back the search engine bots that severely skew your visitor and page view data.
Something to give your selected error code to the offending/hacking/spamming bots so they will cross you off their target list.
Lists of bad bots.
Lists of user agents to ban: SpyderSpanker currently has 107 of the worst offenders banned. Not county what Project HoneyPot bans.
Real-time one click monitoring and banning of malicious IP's.
Ongoing automatic community updates to the banned bots lists.
Multisite control from your main site for all settings on all of your sites. (My favorite feature)
All I do is add the domain Nomenon - naming & branding to the window and press Save & Share settings and all blogs are instantly updated with the new settings. This is done from just one blog on all of them that you have SS installed on.
Here are the bots you might want to block:
Ahrefsbot
gigabot
dotbot
MJ12bot
exabot
adsacomponent
ahrefsbot
aqua_products
asterias
b2w
baidu
blo.gs
blowfish
bot
bullseye
bunnyslippers
cherry pick
collect
copernic
copyrightcheck
cosmos
crawl
crescent
cuil
domainsdb.net
emailwolf
extractorpro
fairad client
freefind
getright
grub
harvest
hatena antenna
hloader
httplib
humanlinks
ia_archiver
iron33
jakarta
keyword density
larbin
libweb
linkextractorpro
linkwalker
lwp-trivial
majestic-12
mata hari
miixpc
mister pix
moget
naver
netants
netmechanic
nicerspro
nutch
offline explorer
ole control
openfind
openfind data gathere
perman
prowebwalker
pycurl
python-urllib
queryn metasearch
radiation retriever
repomonkey
rma
rogerbot
scan
search
siphon
sitesnagger
sogou
sootle
soso
spanner
spider
spyder
stanford
suzuran
szukacz
teleport
teleportpro
telesoft
the intraformant
thenomad
tocrawl
turingos
url control
url_spider_pro
urly warning
vci
web image collector
webauto
webbandit
webcopier
webenhancer
websauger
website quester
webster pro
webstripper
webvac
webzip
wget
whowhere
www-collector-e
xenu
yandex
zeus