WP SpamShield Plugin

WP SpamShield Plugin – THE ALL-IN-ONE ANTI-SPAM PLUGIN FOR WORDPRESS – WITHOUT CAPTCHAS

Leading edge WordPress spam defense, with NO CAPTCHAs, challenge questions or other inconvenience to site visitors. This plugin works silently in the background, and simply makes WordPress spam disappear.

HOW IT WORKS

Most of the spam hitting your site originates from bots, but quite a bit comes from humans too. This plugin works like a firewall to ensure that your commenters are in fact, human, and that those humans aren’t spamming you.

TWO LAYERS OF SPAM BLOCKING

There are two layers of leading-edge anti-spam protection that work together to block both automated (spambots) and human spam:

1. The JavaScript/Cookies Anti-Spam Layer
2. The Algorithmic Anti-Spam Layer

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.

NO MORE WASTED TIME SIFTING THROUGH THE COMMENT SPAM QUEUE

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!

IMPROVES USER-FRIENDLINESS OF YOUR WEBSITE

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 Since your users won’t be inconvenienced by outdated and frustrating anti-spam methods, you will provide a smoother, trouble-free experience for your website users, which leads to improved readership, ad revenue,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.

IMPROVES SECURITY

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.) See this blog post for more info.

HELPS IMPROVE OVERALL WEBSITE PERFORMANCE

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. See this FA for more detailed info.

ZERO FALSE POSITIVES

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.

100% PINGBACK/TRACKBACK VALIDATION AND ANTI-SPAM

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 A SPAM-FREE CONTACT FORM, AND ANTI-SPAM FOR CONTACT FORM 7, GRAVITY FORMS, NINJA FORMS, JETPACK CONTACT FORMS, AND MOST OTHER FORMS

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. (See Installation for info.) 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 formson your WordPress site from automated spam, even if they are not listed here.

WORDPRESS REGISTRATION ANTI-SPAM

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. See this FAQ for more info.

STOPS EMAIL HARVESTERS

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.

WHY NOT JUST USE A CAPTCHA-BASED ANTI-SPAM METHOD?

The concept of using a CAPTCHA as an anti-spam solution in this modern day and age is flawed for several reasons:

1. It’s an outdated concept that has far outlived its usefulness, and was originally developed before user-friendliness was a high priority.
2. It goes in the exact opposite direction of user-friendly design principles. Think about it. Users of your website have to type in numbers and letters obscured by squiggly lines and symbols, only to be told they are wrong several times, even after typing in the correct answer. This is proven to hurt website business and revenue because of the negative feelings it causes. People simply don’t like CAPTCHAs.
3. It is not the user’s responsibility to separate humans from bots, or to stop spam; it’s the web developer’s responsibility. Even if the CAPTCHA is simple, and all the user has to do is click a button, it is still annoying and unnecessary. It’s one extra step that you are putting between your user and their end goal.
4. CAPTCHAs can be defeated. In fact, bots have been cracking CAPTCHAs since 2008. The only benefit of a CAPTCHA was that it was considered to be unbeatable by bots. That day is long past.
5. Why use a CAPTCHA when there are better solutions that don’t inconvenience your website users?