On my wife’s site, we were getting hit from numerous (15+) spam messages a day. We figured this was an acceptable number to just handle manually, but quickly grew tired of taking the time to moderate these comments, marking them as trash.
We tried various CAPTCHA plugins but none were very graceful. From difficult-to-read CAPTCHA strings to stark, unstyled “You have entered an invalid CAPTCHA” message, none of the CAPTCHA plugins we implemented really worked for us.
Then I found this plugin. It’s so simple in its implementation that it’s almost laughable. There’s beauty in what it does, though. It’s not overly complicated, it doesn’t affect the aesthetic of the site AT ALL, and most importantly, it just works.
I’ve had this plugin installed for over 11 years, 7 months and have only received 39851 spam comments. I give it five stars all day long.
Just as a test, I went and toggled the value that sends spam comments to the site administrator. No less than 30 minutes later, I had received a message that was spam. I’ve since toggled the value back to “false” – but it’s sure nice to know the plugin is working. 🙂
UPDATE:
I’ve started to receive several spam messages in the past few days. I contacted the developer and received immediate responses that resulted in an update to the plug-in. Sadly, I continued to receive spam messages after installing the update.
I again contacted the developer who said he’s got some other ideas he’d like to implement. I eagerly await his coming changes. I’ll post an update at that time.
UPDATE 2:
After several back and forth responses from the plug-in author, he has released version 1.5 that hopefully will resolve the issue. It was determined that all the spam I started receiving was trackback spam. I could simply turn off trackbacks on my site, but that would also have disabled pingbacks – which I wanted to keep. Version 1.5 of the Anti-Spam plug-in disables trackbacks, as well as incorporating a different algorithm for trapping regular comment spam. I’m hopeful that this latest iteration of the plug-in will be the answer, but rest assured I’ll post an update if it’s not.
Thank you for this awesome feedback.
I am happy that this plugin helped you.
I tried to make the simplest solution for getting rid of spam and this tiny plugin makes its job pretty good.
Write me back if you will have some troubles with spam in future and I will try to help.
P.S. I did’t make the options page because the idea of the Anti-spam plugin was to completely forget about spam. IMHO spam is not the user’s problem so captcha is bad solution. Also spam is not admin’s problem so there shouldn’t be spam moderation queue. So the key of the problem was to split real users from spam bots.