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As of today’s version 2.5.6, Antispam Bee has an option to trust commenters whose e-mail address has a Gravatar image assigned to it—a simple, yet (hopefully) effective feature in the daily fight against the spamming mob.
Fighting comment spam effectively
Have you ever seen a spam comment with a Gravatar image? I haven’t. So I suggested to include an option in Antispam Bee to trust commenters with a Gravatar by default, and Sergej, creator of Antispam Bee, was kind enough to implement it.
Antispam Bee provides a powerful alternative for Akismet, the anti-spam plugin delivered with WordPress’ core. Antispam Bee does not collect any personal data, nor does it require any kind of registration. It is free to use even on commercial websites and has been actively maintained since 2009.
With 200.000+ active installs up to today the plugin gained high popularity among self-hosting WordPress users all over the world, even though its description in the WordPress.org repository is written in German—a limitation by design, not by accident (as is its incompatibility with Jetpack Comments). The plugin supports five languages including English and Russian.
Developer: Sergej Müller
As mentioned above, Antispam Bee has been created by Sergej Müller, a software engineer from Germany who has contributed a bunch of free plugins to the community, all of which are maintained very decently.
Even though he has two paid solutions in his portfolio, Sergej does not make his living from WordPress. Revenue from his premium plugins mainly goes back into covering server costs, sponsoring community events and balancing out countless hours of development, maintenance, testing and sharing knowledge on his blog and newsletter.
Go try it!
If you don’t know or haven’t used Antispam Bee before, go give it a try! It’s free, easy to use and fully effective in recognizing and flagging comment spam on your WordPress blog.
Hello Caspar,
I feel the urge to leave a short comment and thank you, not only for your genius idea to use gravatars as an indicator for spam detection, but also for an inspiring example how we all can support plugin development.
Often I have the feeling, the wheel gets reinvented as we see yet another plugin for the same task where more would have been achieved if we collaborated. I hope, we see some progress here, when plugins get shared on Github and everybody can fork them and contribute. However, it’s certainly great to share ideas and see them realized.
Also, I really appreciate how you credit one of our finest plugin developers, who often enough is only addressed if a plugin doesn’t work to the expectation of demanding users. It makes me sad to hear, that often Sergej’s great work ends in frustrating conversations by users who take everything for granted but don’t even get the idea to do the very least and write a review, click the “Works on WP version…” button or participate in any other way.
Thank you for your encouraging example.
Kind regards, Bego
Thx, Bego! 🙂
I think its quite an interesting idea, but I wonder how long it will take till spammers start to spam with Gravatars though?
I guess they already do, but not so many, so it’s still a useful feature. 😉