AOS Digital

AOS Comment Spam Cleanup 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.
It works alongside Akismet and other spam filters, not instead of them.
<h4>✨ What you can do</h4>
🔍 Pattern Scanner 
Type a URL fragment (e.g. <code>shorturl.fm</code>) into the scanner, click Check Count to see exactly how many comments match, then choose your action: mark as spam, move to trash, or delete permanently.
⏱ Scheduled Auto-Cleanup 
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.
🤖 Honeypot Bot Protection 
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.
📊 Comment Quality Scoring 
Every new comment is automatically scored based on: 
– Number of external links (+2 per link) 
– Shortlink in author URL (+4 points) 
– Very short text under 15 characters (+2 points) 
– High symbol/punctuation density (+3 points) 
– Known spam keywords like “casino” or “viagra” (+3 points) 
– Excessive ALL-CAPS usage (+2 points)
If the score exceeds your threshold, the comment is held for review or marked as spam automatically.
🚫 Gravatar Privacy (GDPR-friendly) 
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.
💬 Disable Comments Globally 
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.
🛡 WordPress Blocklist Integration 
Add URL patterns directly to WordPress’s native disallowed_keys list — new comments containing those patterns are caught before they even reach the scanner.
📋 Spam Domain Analysis 
Automatically scans your existing spam and trash comments to surface the most common offending domains, so you always know what to block next.
<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>
Akismet is great for real-time filtering — but it doesn’t help you clean up existing spam, and it doesn’t support pattern-based bulk actions. AOS Comment Spam Cleanup fills that gap. Use both.
<h4>🔒 Privacy</h4>
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.
<h4>🌍 Translations</h4>
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>.
<h4>👨‍💻 Developer</h4>
Made by <a href="https://aos-digital.de/" rel="nofollow ugc">AOS Digital</a> — WordPress development from Germany.

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.

Matt Lowe

Unspam by Squelch Design is the simplest <a href="http://squelchdesign.com/wordpress-plugin-squelch-unspam/" rel="nofollow ugc">WordPress anti-spam plugin</a> you can find for reducing your comment spam problem. Once installed there’s nothing 
to configure, and nothing changes to your visitors: No captcha or silly games. Once installed 
the plugin will simply randomize the names of the fields in the comments form on your blog and reject comments that are sent to the 
standard WordPress field names, or where bots have blindly submitted data to the honeypot fields.
What this means for spammers is that they have to do quite a lot more work to send spam to your website. It may also make sending 
spam to your website unreliable as changes to your theme may upset their spam submission tools. Or they may have to resort to using 
humans to send spam to your website (not much I can do about that I’m afraid) which will cost them more money.
Currently implemented:
<ul>
<li>Names of fields are randomized every night at 12:00,</li>
<li>Submissions to the standard WordPress field names are automatically deleted,</li>
<li>Honeypot fields added to comments form,</li>
<li>WooCommerce support.</li>
</ul>
Additional (planned) features:
<ul>
<li>Contact Form 7 integration</li>
<li>Statistical collection,</li>
<li>Automated blocking of persistent IPs,</li>
<li>Opt-in centralized collection of comment spam and statistics for additional research.</li>
</ul>

Squelch Unspam

Unspam makes it harder for spammers to automatedly send spam to your blog by changing the names of the fields in the comment forms.

AOS Comment Spam Cleanup vs Squelch Unspam