Spam bots have been disrupting the internet for over 15 years. Most of these spambots have two primary goals: malicious phishing and black hat SEO. The goal for malicious phishing is to hopefully get the website owner or visitors to click on a spam link that can be used for phishing private data from the users. The other goal of black hat SEO is establishing backlinks on websites using the WordPress comments feature. Sites believe they can rise up the search engine rankings by getting these backlinks. The bottom line is spam can damage your website’s reputation and it’s especially rampant on WordPress websites in forms and comments sections.

Akisment Anti-Spam: The Oldest WordPress Spam Plugin

Akismet Anti-Spam WordPress plugin is the oldest spam filtering plugin. Their plugin has been filtering spam since 2005 for the WordPress community. Matt Mullenweg developed the plugin originally to help his mother blog safely

How does Akismet work?

Akismet (Automatic Kismet) is a way of dealing with spam in an aggregate, crowdsourced process. Every time a person posts a comment or fills out a form on a website with Akismet installed, the system checks it against the crowdsourced database of spam comments and form fills. If it is spam, the comment or form fill is deleted. Any time someone marks a comment or form fill as spam, it is added to the database. In theory, this should make the plugin stronger over time.

How much does Akismet cost?

Akismet has a name your price model to get access to its basic spam protection tool. In theory, you can get the basic tool for free. However, the free version does not support commercial sites or offer priority support. The Plus package is the next step up for most sites and is a $5 per month model for spam protection on 1 commercial site with priority support. Lastly, Akismet offers an Enterprise model at $50 per month for unlimited commercial websites with priority support.

Human Presence: The Invisible WordPress Anti-Spam Solution

Human Presence was developed due to the growing threat of spambots and malicious threats that website developers and eCommerce shop owners face today. Bots are getting smarter and finding ways to evade advanced detection techniques like Akismet Anti-Spam, Google Recaptcha, and others. Bots are also being used to wreck eCommerce flash sales and markets for specific products. The biggest problem with today’s current solutions is that they are stagnant and not getting smarter as bots continue to evolve with the help of hackers and AI. We developed Human Presence to help website owners protect their site with an invisible solution that works in the background, allowing visitors to interact with the website without the hassle of a Turing test.

How does Human Presence work?

Unlike other WordPress anti-spam plugins, we use a “human presence” approach, essentially mapping natural, organic movements and apply the logic to all future site visits. The technology is constantly getting smarter and identifies bots within milliseconds. The behavioral analysis algorithm eliminates false positives with real human visitors to block spam in your WordPress comments and contact forms. Like the Akismet Anti-Spam plugin, we crowdsource our human behavior database from all the websites using Human Presence so that our technology is always getting smarter against spambots. The difference is our database cannot be manipulated like the text-based Akismet spam database. With our advanced risk detection and machine learning techniques, Human Presence is the only solution for complete spam prevention for WordPress.

How much does Human Presence cost?

Human Presence has a comparable pricing structure to other anti-spam WordPress plugins. We do allow every website owner to install the plugin and protect one form for free to test it out.Once you are truly impressed, you can sign up for our annual protection plan to protect unlimited forms on one website for $100 per year. Are you a WordPress agency interested in protecting multiple client sites from spam? Check out our Agency Pricing, here.