Anti Spam by Fullworks : Spam Protection

A great question. The most popular anti-spam plugin for WordPress is Akismet. Akismet is shipped wil the initial install of WordPress giving the impression that it is the most appropriate plugin for comment spam. It is not until you try and use Akismet that you find out that that you have to sign up for an API Key, and then discover that for the vast majority of websites Akismet is not a free anti-spam plugin. Akismet is not free for any website that has any commercial purpose, that means if you hav ean affiliate link or a single advert or sell something or advertise something for sale, or just simply use your website as a brochure for your business you have to pay Akismet a fee. And it not cheap. They also say that they monitor and check for licence abuse. Another popular WordPress anti spam plugin, Clean Talk, is not free at all, for anything. You need to sign up to a plan. After that, there are loads of anti spam plugins that have been around a while. Because they have been around awhile they have built up a high number of users, but a high number of users for an anti spam plugin doesn't necessarily mean it is effective. Many of these established plugin are free and have not sustainable revenue stream to pay for developments and improvements in the fight against WordPress spam. And then there are security plugins, that also do anti-spam. There are many good security plugins, but there strength is security, not necessarily anti spam. In conclusion, Fullworks Anti Spam is a relatively new entrant (2019) to an area with lots of competition. Competion is healthy. What Fullworks Anti Spam has going for it is it is free for Comment spam and it is new so uses the latest techniques. Also with a pro offering, it has funding to keep developing in the ver ending fight against spammers.

The plugin uses techniques to detect automated spam (bots). Bot have certain characteristics that can be detected by our software. When a comment is submitted by a bot it is marked as spam and appears in your comment list under a separate tab as spam. The comment is there for you to review. The plugin also cleans up after a certain number of days, that you set in settings. After a while, once you are convinced all the comments are really spam ( we are confident, but we understand you may want to check things out ) you can set the time to zero days and then never see automated spam again. This is why we call it Stop WordPress Spam.

As a 'set and forget' plugin the settings a under Dashboard>Settings>Anti Spam There is only one setting, enable or disable blocking of bot (automated) comment spam, by default this is on.

Our statistic shows that automated comment spam makes up 99.5% of spam comments, that means that in a typical unprotected blog that gets 600 spam comments you have 3 humans spam comments to deal with. I'm sure that is manageable, but of course if you want to eliminate those you can always upgrade to Pro

It is important for plugins to be commercially viable. If they are not, they wither and die. You see so many abandoned free plugins. Isn't that just annoying when you find after a couple of years you need to find an alternative? We have chosen to put contact form anti spam and registration form anti spam in the Pro version so we can have a revenue stream to keep developing anti spam protection. Contact form spam is the higher volume issue, and most websites with contact forms or WooCommerce registration forms are business websites that should easily be able to afford our modest fees for the Pro version. It is surprisingly small investment - why not upgrade? Upgrade to Pro

Each spam comment is stored under the comments>spam tab for your review and deletion as required

The free plugin is built to protect WordPress comments from spam bots which is 99% of the issue. The Pro version has more sophisticated spam detection techiques including machine learning to prevent human spam and integration to most forms packages. As most sites that have forms are commercial in some form we feel that it is only right that they pay a small amount towards the cost of software and hardware required to provide these features. You can upgrade to a free trial of pro directly from your WordPress plugins page.

Whilst there is an Opt In form, if you skip it the free plugin works exactly the same.