AOS Digital

<p><strong>AOS Comment Spam Cleanup</strong> helps you remove comment spam in bulk using URL pattern matching, and prevents future bot submissions with a honeypot and quality scoring. Whether you have hundreds of shortlink spam comments or want ongoing protection, this plugin has you covered.</p>
<p>It works <em>alongside</em> Akismet and other spam filters, not instead of them.</p>
<h4>✨ What you can do</h4>
<p><strong>🔍 Pattern Scanner</strong><br />
Type a URL fragment (e.g. <code>shorturl.fm</code>) into the scanner, click <strong>Check Count</strong> to see exactly how many comments match, then choose your action: mark as spam, move to trash, or delete permanently.</p>
<p><strong>⏱ Scheduled Auto-Cleanup</strong><br />
Set a WP-Cron job to run hourly, twice daily, daily, or weekly. Configure your patterns and action once — the plugin keeps your comment section clean automatically.</p>
<p><strong>🤖 Honeypot Bot Protection</strong><br />
An invisible form field is added to your comment form. Real visitors never see or fill it. Bots that automatically fill every form field get rejected with a 403 error — silently, without affecting real users who never see or fill the field.</p>
<p><strong>📊 Comment Quality Scoring</strong><br />
Every new comment is automatically scored based on:<br />
– Number of external links (+2 per link)<br />
– Shortlink in author URL (+4 points)<br />
– Very short text under 15 characters (+2 points)<br />
– High symbol/punctuation density (+3 points)<br />
– Known spam keywords like “casino” or “viagra” (+3 points)<br />
– Excessive ALL-CAPS usage (+2 points)</p>
<p>If the score exceeds your threshold, the comment is held for review or marked as spam automatically.</p>
<p><strong>🚫 Gravatar Privacy (GDPR-friendly)</strong><br />
Optionally block all external requests to gravatar.com. When enabled, avatar images are suppressed completely, preventing third-party data transfers without visitor consent — helpful for GDPR / DSGVO compliance.</p>
<p><strong>💬 Disable Comments Globally</strong><br />
Close comments and trackbacks / pingbacks on all posts, pages, and custom post types in one click. Existing comments are not deleted — only new submissions are blocked. Disabling the toggle restores original comment status immediately without any database changes.</p>
<p><strong>🛡 WordPress Blocklist Integration</strong><br />
Add URL patterns directly to WordPress’s native disallowed_keys list — new comments containing those patterns are caught before they even reach the scanner.</p>
<p><strong>📋 Spam Domain Analysis</strong><br />
Automatically scans your existing spam and trash comments to surface the most common offending domains, so you always know what to block next.</p>
<h4>🎯 Who is this for?</h4>
<ul>
<li>Site owners who suddenly find hundreds of shortlink spam comments (you know who you are)</li>
<li>Bloggers who want passive spam protection without a heavy third-party service</li>
<li>Developers managing multiple WordPress sites who need efficient bulk moderation</li>
<li>Anyone frustrated by shortlinks like <code>bit.ly</code>, <code>shorturl.fm</code>, <code>cutt.ly</code> in their comments</li>
</ul>
<h4>❓ Why not just use Akismet?</h4>
<p>Akismet is great for real-time filtering — but it doesn’t help you <em>clean up</em> existing spam, and it doesn’t support pattern-based bulk actions. AOS Comment Spam Cleanup fills that gap. Use both.</p>
<h4>🔒 Privacy</h4>
<p>This plugin does not collect, transmit or store any personal data on external servers. All processing happens on your own server. No external API calls are made during normal operation.</p>
<h4>🌍 Translations</h4>
<p>Ships with English and German (<code>de_DE</code>). Help translate at <a href="https://translate.wordpress.org/" rel="nofollow ugc">translate.wordpress.org</a>.</p>
<h4>👨‍💻 Developer</h4>
<p>Made by <a href="https://aos-digital.de/" rel="nofollow ugc">AOS Digital</a> — WordPress development from Germany.</p>


AOS Comment Spam Cleanup

Clean up comment spam by URL pattern, schedule auto-cleanups, block bots with a honeypot, and auto-score comment quality — all in one panel.

Matthias Pfefferle

Bernhard Kau

Pascal Birchler

Simon Kraft

pluginkollektiv

websupporter

Torsten Landsiedel

Florian Brinkmann

Alain Schlesser

<p>Say Goodbye to comment spam on your WordPress blog or website. <em>Antispam Bee</em> blocks spam comments and trackbacks effectively, without captchas and without sending personal information to third party services. It is free of charge, ad-free and 100% GDPR compliant.</p>
<h3>Feature/Settings Overview</h3>
<ul>
<li>Trust approved commenters.</li>
<li>Trust commenters with a Gravatar.</li>
<li>Consider the comment time.</li>
<li>Allow comments only in a certain language.</li>
<li>Block or allow commenters from certain countries.</li>
<li>Treat BBCode links as spam.</li>
<li>Use regular expressions.</li>
<li>Search local spam database for commenters previously marked as spammers.</li>
<li>Notify admins by e-mail about incoming spam.</li>
<li>Delete existing spam after n days.</li>
<li>Limit approval to comments/pings (will delete other comment types).</li>
<li>Select spam indicators to send comments to deletion directly.</li>
<li>Optionally exclude trackbacks and pingbacks from spam detection.</li>
<li>Optionally spam-check comment forms on archive pages.</li>
<li>Display spam statistics on the dashboard, including daily updates of spam detection rate and a total of blocked spam comments.</li>
</ul>
<h3>Support</h3>
<ul>
<li>Community support via the <a href="https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/antispam-bee" rel="ugc">support forums on wordpress.org</a></li>
<li>Read <a href="https://antispambee.pluginkollektiv.org/documentation/" rel="nofollow ugc">the documentation</a></li>
<li>We don’t handle support via e-mail, Twitter, GitHub issues etc.</li>
</ul>
<h3>Contribute</h3>
<ul>
<li>Active development of this plugin is handled <a href="https://github.com/pluginkollektiv/antispam-bee" rel="nofollow ugc">on GitHub</a>.</li>
<li>Pull requests for documented bugs are highly appreciated.</li>
<li>If you think you’ve found a bug (e.g. you’re experiencing unexpected behavior), please post at the <a href="https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/antispam-bee" rel="ugc">support forums</a> first.</li>
<li>If you want to help us translate this plugin you can do so <a href="https://translate.wordpress.org/projects/wp-plugins/antispam-bee" rel="nofollow ugc">on WordPress Translate</a>.</li>
</ul>
<h3>Credits</h3>
<ul>
<li>Author: <a href="https://sergejmueller.github.io/" rel="nofollow ugc">Sergej Müller</a></li>
<li>Maintainers: <a href="https://pluginkollektiv.org" rel="nofollow ugc">pluginkollektiv</a></li>
</ul>


Antispam Bee

I have been using this for several years now and not had a single issue with spam.

lightweight and awesome.

Thank you.

The best antispam plugin


Using it since years and had no spam in my blog ever. Simple, clean, works.


Best Antispam Plugin


I've tested this plugin and seems to working very well. Most spam comments are gone, some of them (just a little) are able to avoid spam filters.



There is something need to be fixed and I'm already posted in support forum. I hope that it will be fixed soon.


Very good spam filter plugin.


Works quite well without calling out to a remote service, and doesn't require your visitors to be using JavaScript. (Seriously, I posted a test comment using Dillo and it showed up in the moderation queue!) No need to deal with API keys or licensing.



There are some optional tactics that will call a remote service for things like language identification, but so far it's doing the job fine without them!



The only problem I've had with it is that it only acts on comments, not on other features like contact forms.


Privacy-friendly spam filter


Simple to set up and use. Catches all the spam and deletes it before I get a chance to see it. Might miss one or two pieces a week, but that's still better than JetPack and it preserves my users' privacy.


Works better than JetPack


This is an amazing free plugin!What a mental dysfunction to generate spam, what a waste of resources, time, attention.Antispam Bee does a great job, for free.Thank you!


Spam pest...

Sophisticated antispam plugin for effective daily comment and trackback spam-fighting. Built with data protection and privacy in mind.

AOS Comment Spam Cleanup vs Antispam Bee