Small, Efficient WordPress Plugins
Today, I made Spammer Slammer available for general release. It has been running successfully for around 6 months on a handful of beta user sites.
This plugin is for WordPress site administrators who are fed up with the amount of form spam that is getting past whatever spam detection is in place and appearing either as pending comments, or as contact form entries requiring attention.
The purpose of this plugin is provide a second level of form spam detection.
Much of this spam is entered by humans rather than robots and hence it evades detection. The plugin uses the content of the submission itself rather than its source to evaluate the likelihood of it being spam.
The plugin allows you add the words and phrases you want to use to detect spam.
For example, on this site we have the list of spam stopwords. Any comment or contact form containing these words will go in the Spam folder for comments, and into the Trash for contact forms. We build the list by observing what spam is coming through and then adding the phrase and words to the list so the next instance will be detected. As you can see from the list below, most of the spam we are getting on this site is around SEO offerings.
However, we have a few other checks on the content that you can apply to identify spam:
While the spam detection works for all WordPress comments forms, it does not work for all contact forms.
Currently, the contact form processing just works for Gravity Forms via its pre-submission and post-submission hooks.
We will integrate with the Contact Form 7 and Fluent Forms plugins: those two are in the development pipeline.
So if you are fed up with human form spam arriving in your comments or contact forms then check out the Spammer Slammer WordPress Plugin.