AOS Comment Spam Cleanup vs WPBruiser {no- Captcha anti-Spam}

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. ✨ What you can do 🔍 Pattern Scanner Type a URL fragment (e.g. shorturl.fm) 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. 🎯 Who is this for? Site owners who suddenly find hundreds of shortlink spam comments (you know who you are) Bloggers who want passive spam protection without a heavy third-party service Developers managing multiple WordPress sites who need efficient bulk moderation Anyone frustrated by shortlinks like bit.ly, shorturl.fm, cutt.ly in their comments ❓ Why not just use Akismet? 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. 🔒 Privacy 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. 🌍 Translations Ships with English and German (de_DE). Help translate at translate.wordpress.org. 👨‍💻 Developer Made by AOS Digital — WordPress development from Germany.

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