As developers, we love the ease of use and functionality of WordPress, but large amounts of comment spam continue to haunt us all. Whether it’s a blog or a WooCommerce product review, spambots have chosen to flood our inboxes for either malicious phishing or black hat SEO tactics. So what solutions are out there to prevent spam on WordPress forms and comments?

Current WordPress Spam Solutions

Most of the current solutions are natively for WordPress or legacy solutions like Akismet & Recaptcha. These tools do work, but their spam reduction rate is not always the best. Below is a deeper dive into each solution.

Akismet Anti-Spam WordPress Plugin

Akismet Anti-Spam WordPress plugin is the oldest spam filtering plugin. Their plugin has been filtering spam since 2005 for the WordPress community. 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. The problem is AI spambots have caught up with Akismet and found ways around their database to constantly be unique. Consequently, comment and form spam still gets through with Akismet.

Google Recaptcha for Spam Prevention

Louis von Ahn originally developed Recaptcha and a host of other collegiate scholars in 2007 to establish that a computer user is human, but also digitize the books. Google acquired Recaptcha in 2009, which has since evolved from traditional word-based Turing tests to image-based Turing tests.

In 2017, Google released invisible Recaptcha with the hope of decreasing user experience problems and stopping spambots simultaneously. While Google Recaptcha does help some WordPress websites greatly reduce comments and form spam, many sites still deal with spambots even after installing Recaptcha v2 or Recaptcha v3 versions.

The biggest issue with CAPTCHAs is the horrible user experience they create when a human is unable to easily solve the puzzle. Thousands of users have reported issues with both the image-based and text-based CAPTCHAs.

Other WordPress Spam Plugin Options

The other spam prevention plugins are in the same ballpark as Akismet and Google Recaptcha.
These plugins include WP-Spam Shield, WPBruiser, Antispam Bee, and WordPress Zero Spam.
Users report some successes but still deal with the 20-30% of spam getting through forms and comments. We saw this problem and developed the Human Presence WordPress Anti-Spam plugin to eliminate 99% of all form and comments spam.

The Easy Way to Prevent Spam on WordPress

We developed the Human Presence WordPress Anti-Spam plugin to make your life easier and stop all the annoying spam hitting your inbox from forms and comments.

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 is Human Presence Different From the Competition?

We looked at Recaptcha & Akismet and brought it into the new age of machine learning and behavioral analysis. With no preference of platform, we take pride in our technology working with all browsers, forms plugins, and other web platforms like Shopify, Drupal, Magento, and more. Our technology works invisibly in the background to make the user experience unphased and eliminate all form spam, WordPress comments spam, and WooCommerce reviews spam. No more Turing test. Add Human Presence today and start squashing those spambots!

Human Presence Protects WordPress Forms Plugin

Our technology is currently built to support and protect the following forms plugins including:

• Gravity Forms
• Ninja Forms
• Contact Form 7
• Formidable Forms
• WordPress Comments
• WooCommerce Reviews
• WS Form
• Quform
• WeForms
• WPForms
• Fluent Forms
• Elementor Forms

We have plans to build out support for more forms plugins as the community lets us know what they need next.

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.