Get rid of spams once for all with the Anti-Spam WordPress plugin

Are spammers attacking your site? Do you want to get rid of spam once for all?

Then use the great  anti-spam plugin. It is free, very powerful yet ridiculously simple to install and setup.

It just works !

Installation

Installation of the plugin is as usual. Login into your WordPress site as admin. From the dashboard, click on Plugins> Add New. Type anti-spam in the search box and from the results click on Install Now next to the Anti-spam plugin by webvitaly. Do ensure that you install the right plugin because there are many plugins with similar names. After installation, activate the plugin.

Settings

You need not set up anything for this plugin. It just works out-of-the-box.

Total spam blocked

From the WordPress admin dashboard, click on Comments to see the information block with total spam blocked counter. You can hide or show this info block in the "Screen Options" section.

There are other settings that can be changed by changing it in the code. The changes will get overwritten on plugin updates.

Send rejected spam comments to admin email

Enable sending all rejected spam comments to admin email by editing anti-spam.php file. Change

$antispam_send_spam_comment_to_admin = false;

$antispam_send_spam_comment_to_admin = true;

Log all blocked spam comments to log files

$antispam_log_spam_comment = false;

$antispam_log_spam_comment = true;

Spam comments will be saved in the file http://yoursite.com/wp-content/plugins/anti-spam/log/anti-spam-yyyy-mm.log (where "yoursite.com" is the domain and "yyyy-mm" is year and month). Spam log is stored in separate files for each month. History is saved for 1 year and older log files are deleted automatically.

Enable trackbacks

$antispam_allow_trackbacks = false;

$antispam_allow_trackbacks = true;

Features

• Anti-spam plugin blocks 100% of automatic spam messages sent by spam-bots, though it does not block manual spam submitted by spammers manually via browser. It is incompatible with certain other plugins like
  • AJAX Comment Form
  • bbPress
  • Disqus
  • Jetpack Comments
• The blocking algorithm is based on invisible js-captcha and invisible input trap (honeypot technique).
  • The first method, invisible js-captcha, is based on the fact that bots do not have JavaScript on their user-agents. An extra hidden field is added to the comments form. When an user visits the site, JavaScript automatically fills this field in. As spam-bots do not have JavaScript, this field is not filled when it is a spam comment and so it is blocked.
  • The second method, invisible input trap, is based on fact that almost all the bots fill input fields named email or url. Here again, an extra hidden field is added to comments form. When an user visits the site, he does not see this field and it remains unfilled. But a spammer fills this field and thus the comment gets blocked.
• It blocks spam only in the comments form section and does not block spam from other forms on the site.
• All modern browsers and IE8+ are supported.
• Anti-spam plugin works with JavaScript disabled as well. Users with disabled JavaScript should manually fill captcha-like input before submitting the comment.

That is all there is to get ride of comment spam. A simple plugin that works out of the box. Install it and stay happy!

Doc created by: Menaka S.