Antispam Bee

About this plugin

Questions

Does Antispam Bee prevents spam registrations or protects form plugins?

Antispam Bee works best with default WordPress comments. It does not help to protect form plugins and does not prevent spam registrations. Hopefully we can provide better hooks for third party plugins to use Antispam Bee to fill this gap in the forthcoming new major version.

Does Antispam Bee work with Jetpack, wpDiscuz, Disqus Comments and similar comment plugins?

Antispam Bee works best with default WordPress comments. It is not compatible with Jetpack, wpDiscuz or Disqus Comments as those plugins load a new comment form within an iframe. Thus Antispam Bee can not access the comment form directly.

Does Antispam Bee work with AJAX comment plugins or similar theme features?

Whether Antispam Bee works with a comment form submitted via AJAX depends on how the AJAX request is made. If the request goes to the file that usually also receives the comments, Antispam Bee could work with it out of the box (the WP Ajaxify Comments plugin does this, for example).

If the comments are sent to the admin-ajax.php, the antispam_bee_disallow_ajax_calls filter must be used to run ASB for requests to that file as well. If the script does not send all form data to the file, but only some selected ones, further customization is probably necessary, as exemplified in this post by Torsten Landsiedel (in German).

The honeypot field is visible on my site, which uses a strict Content Security Policy. What can I do?

Antispam Bee hides its honeypot field with inline styles. If your site sends a Content Security Policy that does not allow inline styles (a style-src directive without 'unsafe-inline'), the browser drops those styles and the field becomes visible to your visitors.

Use the antispam_bee_honeypot_styles filter to return an empty string, so no inline styles are rendered at all:

add_filter( ‘antispam_bee_honeypot_styles’, ‘__return_empty_string’ );

Then hide the field from your own stylesheet, which your policy already allows:

textarea[aria-label=”hp-comment”] {
padding: 0 !important;
clip: rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px) !important;
position: absolute !important;
white-space: nowrap !important;
height: 1px !important;
width: 1px !important;
overflow: hidden !important;
}

The same filter can also be used to return a modified set of styles instead of an empty one. Do not hide the field with display: none or visibility: hidden, as many spam bots skip fields hidden that way, which is exactly what the honeypot needs them not to do.

Does Antispam Bee store any private user data, and is it compliant with GDPR?

Antispam Bee is developed in Europe. You might have heard we can be a bit nitpicky over here when it comes to privacy. The plugin does not save private user data and is 100% compliant with GDPR.

Will I have to edit any theme templates to get Antispam Bee to work?

No, the plugin works as is. You may want to configure your favorite settings, though.

Does Antispam Bee work with shortened IPs?

Generally yes. However, commissioning the Antispam Bee plugin for canceled or shortened IP addresses in comment metadata is not recommended. Because the name and the e-mail address of the comments are not unique, an IP address is the only reliable measure. The more complete the stored IP addresses, the more reliable the assignment or detection of spam.

How can I submit undetected spam?

If the antispam plugin has passed some spam comments, these comments can be reported for analysis. A Google table was created for this purpose.