AOS Comment Spam Cleanup vs Comments – EchoThread

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. 👀 See the matches before you act A count tells you how many, not which ones. Show matches lists the matching comments — author, comment excerpt, the post it sits on, the date and the current status — so you can spot a pattern that also catches real comments before you run an action that cannot be undone. The list is read-only and closes itself whenever the pattern changes, so it can never describe a different search than the one in the field. ⏱ 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.

EchoThread is a lightweight, privacy-first comment system — a modern Disqus alternative that doesn’t sell your readers’ data or inject ads. This plugin drops EchoThread into any WordPress theme with no code: enter your site key, choose where comments appear, and you’re live. It’s a thin wrapper around the hosted EchoThread widget (~55 KB gzipped, loaded async from a CDN). All storage, rendering, moderation, and spam filtering happen in the hosted service, so the plugin adds no tracking, no database tables, and no page-weight beyond the widget script. Why EchoThread Privacy-first — no ad tech, no third-party trackers, no data resale. GDPR-friendly. AI / ML spam filtering — machine-learning moderation catches AI-generated comment spam that keyword filters miss. Real moderation controls — a per-site restricted-word list, ban or trust individual commenters in one click, and auto-close discussions on older posts. Threaded replies & reactions — a modern discussion UX, not a flat list. Speaks your readers’ language — the widget interface ships in English, Korean, Italian, Simplified Chinese, and Modern Greek. It follows each visitor’s browser by default, or you can pin one language for everyone. Fits any theme — match your light/dark mode or accent color, and switch the social sign-in buttons to compact icons for narrow layouts. Fast — one async script, zero render-blocking, no jQuery. Free tier — get started without a credit card. Disqus migration — import your existing comments via WXR so no conversations are lost. Real counts on your archives — category, tag and home-page teasers show the live EchoThread count instead of the stale WordPress number a migration leaves behind. How it works Create a free account and a site at echothread.io. Install and activate this plugin. Go to Settings → EchoThread Comments, paste your shortname and API key. Choose placement — Replace the theme comments (recommended), Append below content, or Manual via the [echothread] shortcode. That’s it. Comments render on your posts immediately. Privacy This plugin loads https://cdn.echothread.io/widget.js on singular posts/pages where comments are enabled. The widget communicates with the EchoThread API to load and post comments. The plugin itself sets no cookies and collects no personal data. See the EchoThread privacy policy for how the hosted service handles comment data.