Blackhole for Bad Bots vs WPBruiser {no- Captcha anti-Spam}

✨ Trap bad bots in a virtual black hole Important: Do NOT use this plugin on sites with caching. Learn more » 👾 Bye bye bad bots.. Bad bots are the worst. They do all sorts of nasty stuff and waste server resources. The Blackhole plugin helps to stop bad bots and save precious resources for legit visitors. 👾 How does it work? First the plugin adds a hidden trigger link to the footer of your pages. You then add a line to your robots.txt file that forbids all bots from following the hidden link. Bots that then ignore or disobey your robots rules will crawl the link and fall into the trap. Once trapped, bad bots are denied further access to your WordPress site. I call it the “one-strike” rule: bots have one chance to obey your site’s robots.txt rule. Failure to comply results in immediate banishment. The best part is that the Blackhole only affects bad bots: human users never see the hidden link, and good bots obey the robots rules in the first place. Win-win! 🙂 ✨ Add a blackhole trap to help stop bad bots Important: Do NOT use this plugin on sites with caching. Learn more » 👾 Features Easy to set up Squeaky clean code Focused and modular Lightweight, fast and flexible Built with the WordPress API Works with other security plugins Easy to reset the list of bad bots Easy to delete any bot from the list Regularly updated and “future proof” Blackhole link includes “nofollow” attribute Plugin options configurable via settings screen Works silently behind the scenes to protect your site Whitelists all major search engines to never block Focused on flexibility, performance, and security Email alerts with WHOIS lookup for blocked bots Complete inline documentation via the Help tab Provides setting to whitelist any IP addresses Customize the message displayed to bad bots 😉 One-click restore the plugin default options Does NOT use or require any .htaccess rules Blackhole for Bad Bots protects your site against bad bots, spammers, scrapers, scanners, and other automated threats. ✨ Not using WordPress? Check out the standalone PHP version of Blackhole! 👾 Whitelist By default, this plugin does NOT block any of the major search engines (user agents): AOL.com Baidu Bingbot/MSN DuckDuckGo Googlebot Teoma Yahoo! Yandex These search engines (and all of their myriad variations) are whitelisted via user agent. So are a bunch of other “useful” bots. They always are allowed full access to your site, even if they disobey your robots.txt rules. This list can be customized in the plugin settings. For a complete list of whitelisted bots, visit the Help tab in the plugin settings (under “Whitelist Settings”). ✨ Check out Blackhole Pro and level up with advanced features! 👾 Exclusive Pro Features Option to disable for logged-in users Threshold control (number of allowed hits) Custom email alerts Custom messages for blocked bots Custom redirect for blocked bots Custom blackhole trigger links Complete inline documentation Block bots based on user agent Block bots based on IP address Whitelist/allow bots by user agent Whitelist/allow bots by IP address Redirect whitelisted bots Set custom HTTP Status Code Full-featured Bad Bot Log with paging, sorting, and field search Manually add bad bots to the Bad Bot Log Geo/IP location lookups for each bad bot Logs number of blocked hits for each bot ..plus everything the free version can do and more. ✨ Learn more and get Blackhole Pro » 👾 Privacy User Data: This plugin automatically blocks bad bots. When bad bots fall into the trap, their IP address, user agent, and other request data are stored in the WP database. No other user data is collected by this plugin. At any time, the administrator may delete all saved data via the plugin settings. Services: This plugin does not connect to any third-party locations or services. Cookies: This plugin does not set any cookies. Credit: Header Image Courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech. Blackhole for Bad Bots is developed and maintained by Jeff Starr, 15-year WordPress developer and book author. 👾 Support development I develop and maintain this free plugin with love for the WordPress community. To show support, you can make a donation or purchase one of my books: The Tao of WordPress Digging into WordPress .htaccess made easy WordPress Themes In Depth Wizard’s SQL Recipes for WordPress And/or purchase one of my premium WordPress plugins: BBQ Pro – Blazing fast WordPress firewall Blackhole Pro – Automatically block bad bots Banhammer Pro – Monitor traffic and ban the bad guys GA Google Analytics Pro – Connect WordPress to Google Analytics Head Meta Pro – Ultimate Meta Tags for WordPress REST Pro Tools – Awesome tools for managing the WP REST API Simple Ajax Chat Pro – Unlimited chat rooms USP Pro – Unlimited front-end forms Links, tweets and likes also appreciated. Thank you! 🙂

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