Top 25+ WordPress Anti Spam Protection And Management Plugins
After the post I made a few days back about a “Cool Little WordPress Hack To Help Protect Your Blog From Comment Spammers” it got me thinking as to what plugins aside from Askimet are available for wordpress that help control spam. Some research later what I ended up putting together is a comprehensive list of 25 wordpress plugins that are aimed at helping deter and manage spam on your wordpress blog.
All the plugins in this article will work with wordpress v2.8, they should also be compatible with the upcoming v2.9. I hope you enjoy the post and please leave a comment with any plugins that I may have overlooked.
1. WP-SpamFree Anti-Spam
An extremely powerful WordPress anti-spam plugin that eliminates blog comment spam, including trackback and pingback spam. Finally, you can enjoy a spam-free WordPress blog! Includes spam-free contact form feature as well.
Download: WP-SpamFree Anti-Spam
2. SI CAPTCHA Anti-Spam
Adds CAPTCHA anti-spam methods to WordPress on the comment form, registration form, login, or all. In order to post comments or regiser, users will have to type in the phrase shown on the image. This prevents spam from automated bots. Adds security. Works great with Akismet. Also is fully WPMU and BuddyPress compatible.
Download: SI CAPTCHA Anti-Spam
3. AVH First Defense Against Spam
The AVH First Defense Against Spam plugin gives you the ability to block spammers before any content is served. Spammers are identified by checking if the visitors IP exists in a database served by stopforumspam.com, the Project Honey Pot or a local blacklist.
Download: AVH First Defense Against Spam
4. Project Honey Pot Spam Trap
This plugin automatically scatters invisible links to Project Honey Pot spam traps throughout your wordpress blog to help catch and stop spammers.
Project Honey Pot is the first and only distributed system for identifying spammers and the spambots they use to scrape addresses from your website. Using the Project Honey Pot system you can install addresses that are custom-tagged to the time and IP address of a visitor to your site. If one of these addresses begins receiving email Project Honey Pot not only can tell that the messages are spam, but also the exact moment when the address was harvested and the IP address that gathered it.
Download: Project Honey Pot Spam Trap
5. Bad Behavior
Bad Behavior complements other link spam solutions by acting as a gatekeeper, preventing spammers from ever delivering their junk, and in many cases, from ever reading your site in the first place. This keeps your site’s load down, makes your site logs cleaner, and can help prevent denial of service conditions caused by spammers.
Bad Behavior also transcends other link spam solutions by working in a completely different, unique way. Instead of merely looking at the content of potential spam, Bad Behavior analyzes the delivery method as well as the software the spammer is using. In this way, Bad Behavior can stop spam attacks even when nobody has ever seen the particular spam before.
Download: Bad Behavior WordPress Plugin
6. Sabre – Simple Anti Bot Registration Engine
Sabre is an acronym for Simple Anti Bot Registration Engine. It’s a set of counter measures against spam registration on your blog. Your visitors are granted permission to register freely on your blog and now you are plagued by fake users automatically created by spammers? Sabre is the solution to stop definitely these robotized visitors!
Download: Sabre – Simple Anti Bot Registration Engine
7. CryptX
No more SPAM by spiders scanning you site for email adresses. With CryptX you can hide all your email adresses, with and without a mailto-link, by converting them using javascript or UNICODE. Although you can choose to add a mailto-link to all unlinked email adresses with only one klick at the settings.
Download: CryptX
8. yaCAPTCHA
yaCAPTCHA is a CAPTCHA plugin for WordPress that helps you block comment spam from automated bots. In order to post comments, users will have to write down the characters that are part of an image. Since it is relatively hard for automated programs to figure out those characters, this will help prevent comment spam from those programs.
Download: yaCAPTCHA
9. WP Captcha-Free
WP Captcha-Free blocks automated comment spam without resorting to CAPTCHAs. It does so by validating a hash based on time (and some other parameters) using AJAX when the form is posted. Comments posted via automated means will not have a hash or will have an expired hash and will be rejected. Unlike using a captcha, this does not place any burden on the commenter.
Download: WP Captcha-Free
10. Mollom
Mollom protects your website against comment and trackback spam. Mollom differs from other spam deterring services because it takes care of everything. The idea is to relieve you, the administrator, editor, maintainer,… of any moderation or clean up tasks you would normally need to perform in order to keep your blog spamfree.
Download: Mollom
11. NoSpamNX
Most Antispam Plugins focus on user interaction, e.g. captcha or Math calculations to defend you against automated comment spambots. Some use JavaScript and/or Sessions, check each comment against common spam phrases or modify your comment template. NoSpamNX intend to handle automated comment-spam without these measures. It does not require JavaScript, Cookies or Sessions. It does not change your comment template in any way, given you full compatibility with other WordPress- or Browser Plugins.
Download: NoSpamNX
12. Geo Captcha
There are a lot of great plugins to prevent spam but especially the effectiv captcha images can annoy your human visitors. Geo Captcha uses the knowledge that a lot of spam is caused from a few countries and prevents them from spamming.
Visitors from the countries on your whitelist will never see a captcha image and will not be annoyed. Visitors from other countries will have to type in the captcha code or their comments and registrations will be blocked.
Download: Geo Captcha
13. Antispam Bee
Protects your blog from spam by replacing the comment field. It’s easy to use and extremely effective. Really!
Download: Antispam Bee
14. Invisible Defender
This plugin protects registration, login and comment forms from spambots by adding two extra fields hidden by CSS. This approach gave me 100% anti-spam protection on one of my sites.
The idea behind this plugin is simple: SPAMBOTs either fill every form field they find (generic spambots) or fill WordPress-specific fields only (spambots which will recognise WP or are targeting WP only). Therefore it is sufficient to add two extra text fields to form (one empty and one with predefined value), and check theirs values after form is submitted. 1st field (empty one) will be filled by generic spambots, and 2nd one will not be filled by spambots targeting WP only. With these two simple checks probably all spambots can be easily detected, so WP can return error “403 Forbidden” for them.
Download: Invisible Defender
15. WP Clickcha
Clickcha is a unique CAPTCHA system that more secure than traditional text based CAPTCHAs yet easier to use. Clickcha will replace the WordPress post comment button with an image based CAPTCHA that requires a single click to solve and post the comment.
Download: WP Clickcha
16. Ban Hammer
We’ve all had this problem. A group of spammers from mail.ru are registering to your blog, but you want to keep registration open. How do you kill the spammers without bothering your clientele? While you could edit your functions.php and block the domain, once you get past a few bad eggs, you have to escalate. Ban Hammer does that for you, preventing unwanted users from registering.
Download: Ban Hammer
17. WP Emails Encoder
Encodes emails to avoid spammers harvesting them from your site.
Download: WP Emails Encoder
18. Anti-Captcha
Anti-Captcha is a transparent captcha solution which does not require any end-user interaction. It is based on a nonce key, which is dynamically inserted using randomly generated (and obfuscated) javascript.
Download: Anti-Captcha
19. Top Spammers
Top Spammers displays a list of your top spammers’ IP addresses, based on all comments in your database that are marked as spam. It also generates a blacklist for your .htaccess file to block those spammers from your website entirely, thus taking load off the server. – You will need another plugin (like Akismet) to identify the spam.
Download: Top Spammers
20. Invisible Captcha
Smart invisible captcha for wordpress comments. This small plugin 100% protects your blog from a spam in comments.
Download: Invisible Captcha
21. Captcha for Comment
This plugin prevent unwanted spams. Prevent automated spams by bots and most important naughty peoples. It’s simple and yet secure.
Download: Captcha for Comment
22. Conditional CAPTCHA for WordPress
This plugin provides a CAPTCHA complement to Akismet. If Akismet identifies a comment as spam, it will ask the commenter to complete a simple CAPTCHA. If they fail, then the comment will be automatically discarded (and won’t clutter up your spam queue). If they pass, it will be allowed into the spam queue. That way the spam queue will contain only the most likely false positives, making it much easier to find them.
Download: Conditional CAPTCHA for WordPress
23. Amcaptcha
Simple, but strong captcha, built to prevent spam in WordPress comments. Succesfully block Xrumer-like tools. To leave a comment on your blog, visitors need to simple check the captcha’s field. That’s all!
Download: Amcaptcha
24. JR_AntiSpam
This plugin allows you to block spam, very easily, efficiently and quickly! You can use a CAPTCHA code on your comment form to stop automated spam bots. Users must enter the correct code to submit a comment. Logged in users do not see the field! Also, you can enable a basic maths question which all of your users should be able to answer. It just makes it slightly more difficult for spam bots.
Download: JR AntiSpam
25. Verification Code for Comments
Add an verification code when user posting a comment to keep robots away. You can use an image verification code or a math equation instead. Robots may post lots of spam comments into your database. You can add a verification code image or a math equation to avoid this.
Download: Verification Code for Comments
26. Cookies for Comments
This plugin adds a stylesheet to your blog’s html source code. When a browser loads that stylesheet a cookie is dropped. If that user then leaves a comment the cookie is checked. If it doesn’t exist the comment is marked as spam.
Download: Cookies for Comments
