Up until recently we have been using the WordPress plugin Akismet for anti spam protection. Akismet is supplied with every WordPress installation and needs to be enabled with an api key that is freely available after registering an account at the WordPress website. There have been a few problems with Akismet’s anti-spam scanner in recent months mainly that a handful of legit comments were moved into the spam folder by the plugin.
Other concerns were that Akismet was not really a free anti spam plugin as webmasters who made more than $500 per month had to order a commercial version for $55 a year. The last concern was probably the most important one as data is send to Akismet servers including the commenter’s IP, user agent or referrer.
One of the main advantages of Antispam Bee is that it does not have to communicate with external servers for the anti spam protection. It is an all in one solution that detects spam not only in comments but also in trackbacks and pings.
The anti spam plugin runs out of the box after activation in the WordPress interface unlike Akismet which requires the WordPress api key. A few options of the free anti spam plugin can be configured in the WordPress settings. Antispam Bee will delete spam messages automatically when they are detected. This can be changed to mark them as spam and keep them for a limited time in the WordPress spam folder. Great for the first time of usage to monitor the performance of the anti spam software.
The main benefits of using Antispam Bee are twofold. It does increase the privacy of the users who comment on the blog as it does not submit data to third party servers which in turn reduces system resource usage which could be noticeable for blogs that receive many spam comments per day (Ghacks receives about a thousand a day).
We have been testing Antispam Bee for the last days and like the performance and spam detection rate a lot. Only one legit comment was flagged as spam by the anti spam plugin. Even better was the fact that comments from users who were usually flagged as spammers (jojo for example) were not moved to the spam folder at all.
Antispam Bee can be downloaded from the website of the developer. The WordPress plugin itself is multi-lingual (at least German and English).
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are you using this on ghacks instead of akismet?
yes
Thanks for mentioning my plugin.
You’re welcome. Will probably be installed on some additional high profile websites pretty soon (windows7news.com for example)
Thanks , I will try the anti spam plugin.
Tried to poke code but too complex for my limited PHP skills. It does something POST-request related, need to read up on that.
Personally I coded my own simple anti-spam plugin that fits exactly my needs. :) Some day I am going to polich and release it (and seems I am pretty stuck in waiting for right some day).
Thanks for the info. I don’t like askimet spying the ip address of my visitors. And I don’t want to pay either.
Nicely article