Spamming is the most irritating thing for every website. But, we are thankful to the community of WordPress, who have brought us different plugins to protect our website from spamming. These plugins provide protection against different types of spamming, they apply different mechanism for spam prevention.
- Akismet
Akismet
is by far the most popular plugin being used by the millions of
WordPress websites. With over 28millions downloads, Akismet ranks number
one as a spam filter plugin. It smartly filters the comments and
segregates them as spam and genuine. It can straightway block the severe
spam if the moderator chooses to do. It is compatible with all versions
higher than 3.1. This plugin is provided at no cost, for personal use,
but for commercial use, a price has to be paid.
- Antispam Bee
Known
as the biggest competitor of Akismet, Antispam bee is considered the
best solution by many of the users. Over 981 thousand downloads (as per
provided stats) reveal that it is the second most downloaded plugin
after the Akismet. I think, the non availability of documentation is the
reason that Antispam Bee comes after the Akismet in number of
downloads.
- WP Spamfree
It
is a powerful solution for stopping trackback and pingback spam. It has
a feature added that allows permanently blocking the commenter’s IP.
Actually, it provides a comment blacklist option, using which you can
define the “strings” that you don’t allow to publish in your comment
section, whenever such a comment is made on your blog that consists
blacklisted string, comment will be blocked. And, you can see the
blocked comment as well. Plus, it is free for personal as well as
commercial use.
- WP-Spamshield
The
WP-Spamshield is capable of stopping comment spam, contact form spam,
user registration spam, and trackback spam. The user can see all the
blocked spams on dashboard. The developer says that it provides a
powerful trackback and pingback protection, and perfectly works with
popular cache plugins. Availability at zero cost for personal and
commercial use, the Spamshield requires WordPress 3.7 or higher
versions.
- Clean Talk Anti-spam
The
Anti-spam plugin stops every type of spamming such as spam comments,
spam registration, emails, subscriptions, bookings and orders. Actually,
it provides protection for BuddyPress, bbPress, S2Memebr, WooCommerce,
and all types of forms. You can say that it is an all-in-one spam
protection plugin. Plus, the developers have developed an app as well
for users to see the spam statistics. It is good for WordPress 3.0
through 4.1.
Summary
It is utmost to have an anti spam plugin in a website because spamming could ruin it. We have the different choices for plugins, it is difficult to say which plugin is best for a website, because each one is best according to different requirements. Plus, you should test the website’s speed to check if the plugin, you have used, is affecting the loading time, also the compatibility with other caching plugin (if you have used). In the end, a user is the only decision maker that which plugin worked best for him/her. Personally, I like Clean Talk Anti-Spam, because it provides wide protection against spamming.