ActiveLayer Anti-Spam vs WPBruiser {no- Captcha anti-Spam}

Anti-Spam Protection Without CAPTCHAs ActiveLayer is an intelligent anti-spam solution that stops contact form spam, comment spam, and registration spam without CAPTCHAs, puzzles, or extra steps for your visitors. Your forms stay fast and frictionless while unwanted messages get caught automatically. Your time and attention are expensive — stop spending them on spam. ActiveLayer protects popular form builders like WPForms, Contact Form 7, Gravity Forms, Elementor Forms, Fluent Forms, WS Form, and FunnelKit Funnel Builder, plus native WordPress comments, WooCommerce (product reviews and customer registration), Easy Digital Downloads (store reviews and customer registration), AffiliateWP, MemberPress, and BuddyPress / BuddyBoss signup forms, all from a single plugin. With 18 integrations, you manage all your spam protection from one settings page. Create a free account and get started Zero Friction Spam Filtering Most anti-spam tools either show visitors a CAPTCHA or make every form wait while the check runs. ActiveLayer takes a different approach. Async integrations complete immediately while background checks run through Action Scheduler; registration and inline-blocking integrations can run a synchronous check when spam must be stopped before an account, entry, or affiliate record is created. This keeps normal form workflows fast while still allowing high-risk signup flows to block spam inline. If a submission is clean, notifications are sent as normal. If it is flagged, notifications are suppressed or the signup is blocked depending on the integration. Intelligent Spam Detection ActiveLayer analyzes submission patterns, content reputation, behavioral signals, and environment data to catch both automated bots and human bad actors with high accuracy. Unlike simple honeypot or keyword-blocklist approaches, ActiveLayer uses multiple signals to make smarter decisions about every submission. Optional behavioral tracking monitors how users interact with your forms — keystrokes, mouse movements, touch events, and scroll patterns. Environment detection identifies headless browsers and automated tools. These client-side signals are sent alongside form data for deeper analysis. Per-Form Control and Sync Mode You decide exactly which forms to protect. ActiveLayer protects all supported forms and WooCommerce surfaces by default after your API key is connected — you can disable protection per form if needed. This gives you granular control over every contact form, registration form, or comment section on your site. Sync Mode lets supported integrations wait for the API verdict before the submission completes, so spam can be blocked inline. By default, ActiveLayer runs checks asynchronously for maximum speed. Turn Sync Mode on when you prefer inline blocking and can tolerate a small added latency on submissions. Fail-Safe by Design If the ActiveLayer API is temporarily unavailable, your forms keep working. ActiveLayer is designed to fail open — it restores provider defaults, preserves every submission, and retries background checks automatically when connectivity returns. No lost submissions, no blocked emails, no broken forms. Automatic retries handle transient failures. A built-in watchdog checks queue health every 15 minutes and shows admin notices when pending items build up or Action Scheduler is unavailable. You always know the status of your protection. Full Visibility Dashboard See exactly what is happening with your form protection at a glance. The ActiveLayer dashboard shows submission totals, spam caught, accuracy rates, queue health, and integration status — all in one place. Filter submissions by status or provider, and use bulk actions to recheck, mark as clean or junk, or trash items you no longer need. Every submission is logged in a custom database table. You can review verdicts, recheck past submissions with a fresh API call, and override any decision. Debug logging (opt-in, PII-redacted) gives you even deeper insight when troubleshooting. Who Is ActiveLayer For? Small Business Websites Protect your contact forms and inquiry forms without adding friction for potential customers. Async form submissions from real visitors go through instantly while junk gets caught behind the scenes. Bloggers and Publishers Stop comment spam on your posts without requiring readers to solve CAPTCHAs or prove they are human. ActiveLayer checks comments in the background and can auto-approve clean ones or auto-mark detected spam. Agencies Managing Multiple Sites One plugin covers WPForms, Contact Form 7, Gravity Forms, Elementor Forms, Fluent Forms, Formidable Forms, WooCommerce, and more — every integration managed from one settings page. No need to configure separate anti-spam tools for each form builder or WooCommerce surface your clients use. E-commerce and Service Businesses Keep inquiry and support forms clean while maintaining a fast, professional user experience. Async checks keep contact forms moving quickly, while registration gates can block spam accounts inline. WooCommerce stores get dedicated protection for product reviews and My Account customer registration — and the checkout itself is never gated, so spam protection can’t get in the way of a sale. Membership Sites and Online Communities Running a community on BuddyPress or BuddyBoss Platform? ActiveLayer hooks the public signup form and blocks spam registrations before they create fake accounts — no extra CAPTCHA in front of your real members, no manual moderation queue to babysit. The integration covers both free BuddyPress and BuddyBoss Platform with a dedicated admin toggle for each. Full ActiveLayer Feature List Async processing – Background queue via Action Scheduler for supported async integrations No CAPTCHA required – Invisible protection with zero friction for visitors WPForms integration – Per-form enable, async checks with email replay, optional sync-save strategy Contact Form 7 integration – Synchronous checks, field mapping via activelayer:* tags, per-form control Gravity Forms integration – Entry-based spam detection with per-form control and notification management Elementor Forms integration – Protect Elementor Pro form widgets with per-form spam filtering Fluent Forms integration – Per-form spam detection with email notification handling Formidable Forms integration – Notification interception and replay, sync fallback option Forminator integration – Form submission interception with per-form toggles and notification management Ninja Forms integration – Email action capture, clean verdict replay, spam suppression SureForms integration – Spam protection for SureForms with per-form control WS Form integration – Synchronous spam blocking before WS Form saves entries or runs actions, with per-form control WordPress Comments protection – Auto-approve clean comments, auto-spam detected ones, fail-open restore WooCommerce Reviews protection – Score every product review on submission, with optional verified-owner bypass, logged-in-user bypass, and high-confidence auto-delete WooCommerce Registration protection – Block bot signups on the My Account registration form before the account is created (the checkout flow is never gated, so it can’t block a purchase) BuddyPress signup protection – Block spam registrations on the public /register/ page; sync check fires after BuddyPress’s own validation and writes the block message next to the username field BuddyBoss Platform signup protection – Same sync gate against the BuddyBoss Platform signup form, with automatic xprofile-name fallback because BuddyBoss auto-generates the username from the email AffiliateWP registration protection – Block bot affiliate signups before the affiliate and WordPress user are created; sync check fires after AffiliateWP’s own validation MemberPress registration protection – Block bot membership signups before the account is created; free, free-trial, and fully-discounted signups are gated by default, while paid checkouts are never blocked (opt in to gate those too) FunnelKit Funnel Builder integration – Synchronous spam blocking for opt-in forms before FunnelKit runs email, CRM contact, and webhook actions, with per-form control Easy Digital Downloads integration – Spam protection for product reviews and the standalone customer registration form; the EDD checkout is never gated, so it can’t block a purchase Silent discard for high-confidence spam – Optional hard-delete of comments and WooCommerce reviews that exceed a configurable spam score threshold (default 95), skipping spam-folder storage entirely Per-form toggles – Protection enabled by default per form; disable on individual forms as needed Sync Mode – Optional synchronous spam checks for inline blocking on supported integrations Dashboard analytics – Submission totals, spam caught, accuracy rates, queue health at a glance Submissions management – Filter by status and provider, bulk recheck, mark clean or spam, trash Fail-open architecture – Forms keep working if the API is temporarily unavailable Automatic retries – Failed submissions are re-queued and retried automatically Queue watchdog – 15-minute health checks with admin notices for stalled queues Behavioral signal collection – Keystroke, mouse, touch, and scroll tracking for deeper analysis Environment detection – Identifies headless browsers and automated submission tools Debug logging – Opt-in ring buffer (last 200 entries), PII-redacted, view and clear in admin Bulk recheck – Re-queue past submissions for fresh API verdicts anytime Default protection – Forms protected by default after API connection; disable per form if needed. Sanitized logging, masked secrets, hashed emails Integrations WPForms (Lite and Pro) Contact Form 7 Gravity Forms Elementor Forms (Pro) Fluent Forms Formidable Forms Forminator Ninja Forms SureForms WS Form WordPress Comments (built-in) WooCommerce (product reviews and customer registration) BuddyPress (public signup form) BuddyBoss Platform (public signup form) AffiliateWP (affiliate registration form) MemberPress (membership registration form) FunnelKit Funnel Builder (opt-in forms) Easy Digital Downloads (product reviews and customer registration) External services This plugin connects to the ActiveLayer API to analyze form submissions and comments for spam. It is the core service that powers all spam detection — without it, the plugin cannot classify submissions. ActiveLayer API What it does: Provides spam detection verdicts (clean or spam) for form submissions and comments. When data is sent: Each time a protected form submission, comment, review, or registration is checked, the submission data is sent to the API for analysis. Depending on the integration, this can happen through the background queue or during a synchronous inline-blocking check. What data is sent: * Submission content (name, email, message, URL if provided) * IP address and user agent of the submitter * Form metadata (form ID, form name, provider name) * Site URL and WordPress locale * Behavioral and environment signals (if enabled in settings) Service provider: ActiveLayer (activelayer.com) * Terms of Service * Privacy Policy

WPBruiser (formerly GoodBye Captcha) is an anti-spam and security plugin based on algorithms that identify spam bots without any annoying and hard to read captcha images. WPBruiser completely eliminates spam-bot signups, spam comments, even brute force attacks, the second you install it on your WordPress website. It is completely invisible to the end-user – no need to ever fill out a Captcha or other “human-detection” field ever again – and it just works! Unlike other anti-spam plugins, which detect spam comments and signups after the fact and move them to your spam folder, which you then have to delete – using up not only your website’s resources, but your time as well, WPBruiser prevents the bots from leaving spam in the first place. The result is that your site is not only spam free, it’s faster and more secure. In addition, WPBruiser is completely self-contained and does not need to connect to any outside service. Your logins remain yours, 100%. WPBruiser fights Brute Force attacks and eliminates spam-bots on comments, signup pages as well as login and password reset pages. At the click of a button, you can decide which forms to protect. Summary of WPBruiser features Standard WordPress Login form integration Standard WordPress Register form integration Standard WordPress Forgot Password form integration Standard WordPress Comments form integration Ability to set the maximum number of characters for each comment field Logging with the ability to enable/disable it Automatically Block IP Addresses Automatically purge logs older than a certain number of days Manually white-list trusted IP Address (IPV4 and IPV6) Manually block/unblock IP Addresses (IPV4 and IPV6) Properly detects client IP Address when using CloudFlare, Incapsula, Cloudfront, RackSpace, Sucuri CloudProxy, AWS ELB Provides statistics, reports, maps and charts with all blocked spam attempts No requests to external APIs Can be switched to “Test Mode” – for testing Compatible with WordPress Multisite – network admin interface ready Compatible with cache plugins (WP Super Cache, W3 Total Cache, ZenCache, WP Fastest Cache and others) Invisible for end users (works in the background) Does not affect page loading times Brute Force Protection Automatically detects Brute Force attacks Ability to automatically block IP Addresses Prevents User Enumeration Ability to block most dangerous IP addresses involved in brute force attacks Ability to block most dangerous Anonymous Proxy IP addresses including TOR Networks, TOR Nodes and TOR Exit Points Ability to Completely Disable XML-RPC service – it seamlessly works with Jetpack plugin activated Ability to Disable XML-RPC Pingbacks Email notifications when a Brute Force Attack is detected WPBruiser Available Extensions WPBruiser is integrated with the most popular plugins Contact Forms Extensions WPBruiser – Contact Form 7 WPBruiser – Gravity Forms WPBruiser – Ninja Forms WPBruiser – Formidable Forms WPBruiser – Fast Secure Contact Form WPBruiser – Jetpack Contact Form (FREE – merged into the core) Membership Extensions WPBruiser – BuddyPress WPBruiser – MemberPress WPBruiser – UserPro WPBruiser – User Profiles Made Easy WPBruiser – Ultimate Member (FREE – merged into the core) eCommerce Extensions WPBruiser – WooCommerce WPBruiser – Easy Digital Downloads WPBruiser – AffiliateWP Email Subscriptions Extensions WPBruiser – MailPoet WPBruiser – Easy Forms for MailChimp View all WPBruiser Extensions WPBruiser is also integrated with the following plugins: Postmatic (https://wordpress.org/plugins/postmatic) WPBruiser offers protection for the entire email commenting system Epoch (https://wordpress.org/plugins/epoch) WPBruiser offers protection for the entire chat and commenting system wpDiscuz (https://wordpress.org/plugins/wpdiscuz/) WPBruiser offers protection for the entire commenting system MailChimp for WordPress (https://wordpress.org/plugins/mailchimp-for-wp) WPBruiser offers protection for all forms the user will create with MailChimp Ultimate Member (https://wordpress.org/plugins/ultimate-member) WPBruiser offers protection for Login, Registration and Reset Password forms Jetpack by WordPress (https://wordpress.org/plugins/jetpack) WPBruiser offers protection for JetPack Contact Form ZM Ajax Login & Register (https://wordpress.org/plugins/zm-ajax-login-register) WPBruiser offers protection for Login and Registration forms Login With Ajax (https://wordpress.org/plugins/login-with-ajax) WPBruiser offers protection for Login, Registration and Lost Password forms WP User Control (https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-user-control) WPBruiser offers protection for Login, Registration and Lost Password forms PlanSo Forms (https://wordpress.org/plugins/planso-forms/) WPBruiser offers protection for all forms Theme My Login (https://wordpress.org/plugins/theme-my-login) WPBruiser offers protection for Login, Registration and Lost Password forms Seamless Donations (https://wordpress.org/plugins/seamless-donations) WPBruiser offers protection for the donation form Technical support If you notice any problems by using this plugin, please notify us and we will investigate and fix the issues. Ideally your request should contain: URL of the website (if your site is public), Php version, WordPress version and all the steps in order to replicate the issue (if you are able to reproduce it somehow) Donate If you find this plugin useful, please consider making a small donation. Thank you