WP-SpamShield – WordPress Anti-Spam Plugin

The first anti-spam layer uses a dynamic combination of JavaScript and cookies to weed out the humans from spambots, preventing 100% of automated spam from ever getting to your site. Even if bot authors could engineer a way to break through the JavaScript/Cookies Anti-Spam Layer, the Algorithmic Anti-Spam Layer would still stop almost all of the spam that the JavaScript Layer blocks, and provides close to a fully redundant backstop. This JavaScript Anti-Spam Layer utilizes multiple randomly generated keys, and is algorithmically enhanced to ensure that spambots won’t beat it. The powerful Algorithmic Anti-Spam Layer consists of over 100 advanced filters, and eliminates trackback spam and most human spam as well. And, it does all that without hindering legitimate comments, trackbacks, contact forms, or registrations.

This type of solution works invisibly in the background, with no inconveniences. You won’t have to waste valuable time sifting through a spam queue any more, because there won’t be anything there. WP-SpamShield is different from other anti-spam plugins in that it BLOCKS spam at the front door of your site and doesn’t allow it into the WordPress database at all. Many other anti-spam plugins simply label a comment as spam, leaving you to sort through a spam queue, which wastes your valuable time. WP-SpamShield will give you back your time!

If you want to improve the user-friendliness of your site, this is THE anti-spam plugin you want. After all, why should your users have to prove they are human? Since your users won’t be inconvenienced by outdated and frustrating anti-spam methods, you will provide a smoother, trouble-free experience for your website users, which leads to improved readership, ad revenue, sales, or other types of conversion, and therefore greater success for your website.

Not allowing spam into the database improves security by potentially preventing SQL injection, DDoS, and XSS exploit attacks through automated spam comment submissions. WP-SpamShield fixes the security issues inherent to Pingbacks, and prevents Pingback-based DDoS attacks. As part of the Miscellaneous Form Spam Protection, the plugin protects against XML-RPC brute force amplification attacks. The plugin also has several other features that improve security, such as blocking certain potentially dangerous URLs in spam comment submissions, and limiting comment size to 15kb. (15kb of text is roughly the equivalent of 3 typed pages in Microsoft Word, single-spaced, so that’s more than enough for even the longest of comments.)

The plugin helps keep your WordPress database slimmer and more efficient (keeping your site running faster in the long term) by not allowing the thousands upon thousands of spam comments into it, which could bloat the database and potentially corrupt it. Keeping your database lean is extremely important, because bloated databases result in much longer query times and increased server load, slowing down a site dramatically even for simple functions. If website performance is important to you, then you definitely want an anti-spam plugin like WP-SpamShield instead of a plugin that uses a spam queue.

It does all this with ZERO false positives, because of the method used to block spam. Notice we didn’t say a “low false positive rate” – we said ZERO false positives. If a comment/contact form/registration gets blocked as spam, the user is given instant feedback and has a chance to correct their comment/contact form/registration/etc and try again, which means there cannot be false positives. This leads to fewer frustrated website visitors, and less work for you. We are committed to keeping the promise of zero false positives.

The trackback validation contains a filter that compares the client IP address of the incoming trackbacks and pingbacks against the IP address of the server where the link is supposedly coming from. If they don’t come from the same server, then it is guaranteed spam, without fail. This alone eliminates more than 99.99% of trackback & pingback spam. Trackback spammers don’t send spam out from the same server where their clients’ websites reside. There are algorithmic anti-spam filters in place to ensure 100% trackback/pingback spam blocking. You can be confident that only legitimate trackbacks and pingbacks will get through.

Includes drop-in spam-free contact form, with easy one-click installation. Easy to use – no configuration necessary, but you can configure it if you like. WP-SpamShield also includes automatic anti-spam protection for Contact Form 7, Gravity Forms, Ninja Forms, JetPack Contact Forms, Fast Secure Contact Forms, Formidable Forms, and more. (You don’t have to do a thing…just add your Contact Form 7, Gravity Forms, Ninja Forms, JetPack Contact Forms, or other forms to your site, and they will automatically be protected.) It will automatically protect most forms on your WordPress site from automated spam, even if they are not listed here.

The plugin also includes powerful protection from user registration spam. Once you install WP-SpamShield, you don’t have to worry about bots or spammy users signing up any more. (Note: This protects almost all registration forms, including the WordPress default registration form, and registration forms for bbPress, BuddyPress, WooCommerce, s2Member, WP-Members, and many more.

The plugin has a feature to thwart email harvesting bots and keep them from scraping your site for email addresses. (Which helps reduce spam in your email inbox.) The plugin automatically obfuscates plain text email addresses and mailto links in your website content by encoding them into HTML entities (hexadecimal and decimal character codes that look like gibberish to harvesters, but render the email addresses perfectly in a browser). It protects email addresses on pages, posts, comments, excerpts, and text widgets.

This plugin has an extremely low overhead and won’t slow down your site, unlike some other anti-spam plugins. Each of the filters in the plugin have been benchmarked, and when processing comments for spam, the fastest filters are put at the front of the stack. Once a comment tests positive for spam, the testing process terminates and will not engage the remaining filters. Additionally, as mentioned above, by keeping spam out of the WordPress database altogether, WP-SpamShield helps keep your database slimmer and more efficient, which in turn helps keep your site running faster. This efficiency helps keep the server load down, and helps improve the overall performance of your site. WP-SpamShield is optimized to work well with all major caching plugins.

Speaking of scalability, WP-SpamShield can kill spam faster than any cloud-based anti-spam solution. Cloud-based anti-spam plugins are inherently slower at processing spam because they have to connect to an external server to check the spam status, which in turn will increase your site’s server load. With WP-SpamShield, all anti-spam processing happens directly on your website’s server, with lightning speed.

If you have any issues with the plugin, we are here to help. Simply submit a support request at the WP-SpamShield Support Page, and we’ll help you diagnose and fix the issue quickly.