Spam protection, Honeypot, Anti-Spam by CleanTalk vs Hikari

Trusted by over 200,000 websites and rated among the top anti-spam solutions for WordPress in 2026. No CAPTCHAs, no puzzles, and no visitor friction — just automatic spam blocking for forms, comments, registrations, subscriptions, and fake orders. Powered by a global spam detection network that includes over 1,078,000 websites and helps stop spam before it reaches your website. Install it in less than 30 seconds and start protecting your site immediately. Superpowers Stops spam comments. Stops spam registrations and logins. Stops spam contact emails. Stops fake orders eCommerce sites and online stores. Antispam for bookings. Antispam subscriptions. Stops spam surveys, polls. Stops spam in WooCommerce. Antispam for Search Form. Real-time email validation. Check if an email is real or fake. Checks and removes the existing spam comments and spam users. Blocking disposable & temporary emails. Block messages by languages, countries, networks and stop words. Public reviews It’s more than just a tool to combat spam; it’s an integral component that enhances the overall quality and performance of your website. techbusinessnews.com.au Improve Your Security WordPress Spam Protection With CleanTalk Anti-Spam The Hacker News. Compare reCAPTCHA & Akismet VS CleanTalk CleanTalk vs Google reRECAPTCHA CleanTalk vs Akismet Free trial then $12 per year CleanTalk is an anti-spam plugin which works with the premium Cloud Anti-Spam service cleantalk.org. This plugin as a service https://developer.wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-org/detailed-plugin-guidelines/#6-software-as-a-service-is-permitted AntiSpam protection for comments Native spam protection for WordPress, JetPack comments and any other comment plugins. The plugin moves spam comments to SPAM folder or you can set the option to ban spam comments silently. You can also enable the option in the plugin settings to auto-delete comments from SPAM folder. Contact Form 7 Antispam Plugin extends spam protection for Contact Form 7 (CF7). It can be used with any other third-party spam filters. How to protect your Contact Form 7 using CleanTalk Anti-Spam plugin Contact Form by WPForms Antispam Plugin extends Contact Form by WPForms to provide spam protection. It filters spam submissions for each type of forms – simple contact form, marketing form, request a quote and etc. Antispam for WooCommerce & fake orders filter Anti-spam by CleanTalk filters spam registrations, spam reviews, and fake orders for WooCommerce (any eCommerce plugin as well). The plugin is fully compatible with WooCommerce 2.1+ and online stores. Many other great contact, signups and all kind of forms that supported by Anti-Spam plugin by CleanTalk Asgaros Forum Avada Forms AWeber form builder Awesome Support – WordPress HelpDesk & Support Plugin Back In Stock Notifier for WooCommerce | WooCommerce Waitlist Pro bbPress by John James Jacoby Brave Popup Builder – Popup, Optins, Lead Generation, Survey & Interactive Content Brevo – Email, SMS, Web Push, Chat, and more by Brevo Calculated Fields Form Chatway Live Chat – AI Chatbot, Customer Support, FAQ & Helpdesk Customer Service & Chat Buttons Contact Form Clean and Simple Contact Form by BestWebSoft – Advanced WP Contact Form Builder for WordPress Contact Form Plugin by Fluent Forms Ninja forms Contact Form by Supsystic Contact Form Email Constant Contact Forms Comments – wpDiscuz By AdvancedCoding Customer Reviews for WooCommerce Floating Chat Widget: Contact Chat Icons, Telegram Chat, Line Messenger, WeChat, Email, SMS, Call Button – Chaty Forminator Forms – Contact Form, Payment Form & Custom Form Builder Easy Digital Downloads – eCommerce Payments and Subscriptions made easy eForm – WordPress Form Builder Elementor – Build, Design & Manage Forms From One Place Elfsight Blocks for Elementor — 80+ Widgets Events Manager – Calendar, Bookings, Tickets, and more! By Marcus (aka @msykes) Everest Forms – Contact Form, Payment Form, Quiz, Survey & Custom Form Builder with AI FiboSearch – Ajax Search for WooCommerce Flamingo Fluentbooking.com Formidable Forms – WordPress Form Builder for Contact Forms, Calculators, Quizzes & More Form Maker by 10Web – Mobile-Friendly Drag & Drop Contact Form Builder GeoDirectory – WP Business Directory Plugin and Classified Listings Directory GiveWP – Donation Plugin and Fundraising Platform gravityforms.com – Powerful data capture fueled by Gravity Forms Gwolle Guestbook Happyforms – Form Builder for WordPress: Drag & Drop Contact Forms, Surveys, Payments & Multipurpose Forms HivePress – Business Directory, Listings & Classified Ads Plugin HubSpot All-In-One Marketing – Forms, Popups, Live Chat Hustle – Email Marketing, Lead Generation, Optins, Popups JetFormBuilder — Dynamic Blocks Form Builder Jetpack – WP Security, Backup, Speed, & Growth Jotform – Online Forms — Customizable Payment, Contact, Quiz, Survey Form Builder Kadence Blocks — Page Builder Toolkit for Gutenberg Editor Kali Forms (Free & Pro) — Contact Form & Drag-and-Drop Builder Klaviyo Kulahub Landing Page Builder – Coming Soon page, Maintenance Mode, Lead Page, WordPress Landing Pages Leaky Paywall LearnPress – WordPress LMS Plugin for Create and Sell Online Courses Lead Form Builder & Contact Form By ThemeHunk Login & Register Customizer – Popup | Slider | Inline | WooCommerce MailChimp Forms by MailMunch MailOptin – Popup, Optin Forms & Email Newsletters for Mailchimp, HubSpot, AWeber Etc. My Sticky Elements – All-in-one Sticky Floating Contact Form, Call, Click to Chat, and 50+ Social Icon Tabs MetForm – Contact Form, Survey, Quiz, & Custom Form Builder for Elementor Newsletter – Send awesome emails from WordPress by Stefano Lissa Newsletters by Tribulant Software Newsletters – MC4WP: Mailchimp for WordPress NEX-Forms – Ultimate Forms Plugin for WordPress by Basix Nextend Social Login and Register by Nextendweb Ninja forms by Kevin Stover Piotnet by piotnet.com Product Enquiry for WooCommerce (Now with AI Assistant) By WisdmLabs Quform by quform.com QuickCal by quickcal.co RegistrationMagic – Custom Registration Forms, User Registration, Payment, and User Login By Metagauss Simple Registration for WooCommerce By Astoundify Smart Forms – when you need more than just a contact form By EDGARROJAS Strong Testimonials By WP Chill SureForms – Drag & Drop Contact Form & Form Builder, Payment Form, Survey, Quiz & Calculator By Brainstorm Force User Registration & Membership – Free & Paid Memberships, Subscriptions, Content Restriction, User Profile, Custom User Registration & Login Builder By wpeverest Visual Form Builder By Matthew Muro WP Booking System – Booking Calendar By Roland Murg User Frontend: AI Powered Frontend Posting, User Directory, Profile, Membership & User Registration By weDevs WS Form LITE – Drag & Drop Contact Form Builder By Mark Westguard Wufoo Shortcode By wronganswersonly WP User Frontend, UserPro WordPress Landing Pages ZeroBounce Email Verification & Validation By zerobounce Zoho Forms – Drag & Drop Form Builder for Websites – Contact Forms, Payment Forms, Order Forms & More By Zoho Forms Protection for the forms above works as a built-in feature of Anti-Spam by CleanTalk without requiring any additional actions from the user. Check existing comments for spam. Bulk spam comments removal. Spam comment Cleaner With the help of anti-spam by CleanTalk you can inspect through existing comments to find and quickly delete spam comments at once. To use this function, go to WP Console -> Comments -> Find spam comments. Check existing users for spam. Bulk spam accounts removal. Spam users cleaner With the help of anti-spam by CleanTalk you can inspect through existing accounts to find and quickly delete spam users at once. For use this function, go to WP Console -> Users -> Check for spam. Also, you can export a list of spam users to the CSV. Private black lists for anti-spam service Automatically block comments and registrations from your private black IP/email address list. Hide «Website» field for comments This option hides the «Website» field from standard WordPress comments forms. After that spammers won’t be able to send spam links using «Website» field in the bottom of the comments form. Low false/positive rate This plugin uses multiple anti-spam tests to filter spam bots having as low false/positive rate as possible. Spam FireWall Spam FireWall allows blocking the most active spam bots before they get access to your website. It prevents spam bots from loading website pages so your web server doesn’t have to perform all scripts on these pages. Also it prevents scanning of pages of the website by spam bots. Therefore Spam FireWall significantly reduces the load on your web server. Spam FireWall also makes CleanTalk the two-step protection from spam bots. Spam FireWall is the first step and it blocks the most active spam bots. CleanTalk Anti-Spam is the second step and checks all other requests on the website in the moment of submitting comments/registers etc. How does it work? The visitor enters to your web site. HTTP request data are being checked in the nearly 5.8 million of the identified spam bot IPs. If it is an active spam bot, the bot gets a blank page, if it is a visitor then he receives a normal page. This process is completely transparent for the visitors. All the CleanTalk Spam FireWall activity is being logged in the process of filtering. Spam FireWall: Anti-Flood & Anti-Crawler Spam FireWall: Anti-Flood and Anti-Crawler options are intended for blocking unwanted bots, content parsing, shop goods prices parsing or aggressive website scanning bots. Learn more https://cleantalk.org/help/anti-flood-and-anti-crawler By default, well-known good bots — including AI crawlers such as GPTBot (ChatGPT), ClaudeBot (Claude), Google-Extended (Gemini), and Copilot — are allowed. You can choose which of these bots to block individually in your private lists. Blocking a bot will stop the corresponding AI service from accessing your content. How to protect sites from spam bots without CAPTCHA? CleanTalk Anti-Spam protects websites from spam bots without using traditional CAPTCHA, reCAPTCHA, or other visitor challenges. Instead of showing CAPTCHA puzzles, the service uses behavioral analysis, invisible JavaScript tests, and a global spam database to detect spam automatically in the background. This CAPTCHA-free anti-spam protection works for contact forms, comments, registrations, and WooCommerce checkouts without creating friction for real visitors. By replacing CAPTCHA with automated spam detection, CleanTalk helps improve usability, accessibility, and conversion rates while still blocking spam effectively. Sometimes CAPTCHA reminds us of the doodles of a two year old child. For users with vision problems CAPTCHA is an insurmountable obstacle. Users hate captcha. Captcha for users means “hate”. Unreadable CAPTCHA stops about 80% of site visitors. After 2 failed attempts to decipher CAPTCHA 95% of visitors reject further attempts. At the sight of CAPTCHA and after input errors, many visitors leave the resource. Thus, CAPTCHA helps to protect the resource spam both from bots and visitors. CAPTCHA is not a panacea from spam. Doubts concerning the Need for CAPTCHA? “Ultimately, CAPTCHAs are useless for spam because they’re designed to tell you if someone is ‘human’ or not, but not whether something is spam or not.” Matt Mullenweg Real-time email validation. Is email real or Not. It is very important to be sure that the user used his real email address. Spambots very often use fake email addresses, i.e. which addresses do not exist. CleanTalk will check email addresses for existence in real time. Non-existing email addresses also entail several other problems for website owners. You can never contact them by email, the client will never receive any notifications from you (account activation letter, password recovery, email distribution, notifications, etc.), if you use email marketing for your clients, then a large number of nonexistent emails in the mailing list may result in your IP address being added to various blacklists of email servers. Improve your email list with email validation without fake emails. Blocking disposable & temporary emails Block fake and suspicious users with disposable & temporary emails to improve email delivery. So, it also prevents malicious activity, spam bots, and internet trolls. Stops Spam in Search Form Spam bots can use your search form to make a GET request with spam text. CleanTalk Anti-Spam has the option to protect your website search form from spam bots. Each time, the search generates a new page and if there are many requests, this can create additional load. So, under some conditions, spam searches can be indexed, which affects SEO, Anti-Spam protection for website search forms repels spam bots. If your search form gets data too often the CleanTalk Anti-Spam plugin will add a pause and increase it with each new attempt to send data. It saves your web server processor time. Spam protection allows you to not forbid indexation for the crawler bots if you really need it but simultaneously you will get protection from spam bots. You will always know what users were looking for on your site. Disable comments This option disables comments on your site. You can choose one or several options: Disable comments for posts Disable comments for pages Disable comments for media When using Disables comments, existing comments will not be deleted and will remain on the pages. Email, Phones Address Encoder CleanTalk Anti-Spam offers a feature called “Encode contact data” that is designed to encode all email addresses on the website pages. Encoding email, phontes addresses increases the level of protection of contact data from being abused, parsed, getting spammed and used in spam mailing lists by bots and online criminals. To reveal the encoded email address simply click on it and it will be decoded instantly. Honeypot field The option helps to block bots. The honeypot field option adds a hidden field to the form. When spambots come to a website form, they can fill out each input field. Enable this option to make the protection stronger on these forms. Learn more about supported forms here.

Spam is website publishers #1 concern, we wanna share our and our visitors’ emails to those who should have access to them, but don’t want spam harvesters stealing them and sending garbage to us. A lot of techniques had been developed to hide our emails from these delinquents, while having them shown to real people. And together with spam harvesting, on 15 June 2009, Matt Cutts, a well known software engineer of Google, announced that Google Bot will no longer ignore nofollowed links for PageRank, and now we lose PR/link juice for every link we add to our pages, even if we use rel=”nofollow” on them. So, now we must hide links from Search Engines too! I’ve been searching for an ultimate obfuscation solution for both emails and URLs, that would be user-friendly for me the content publisher, and for my visitors. I’ve seen a lot of solutions, some that inspired me, but none that would fit my needs. It was time to start coding 🙂 Hikari Email & URL Obfuscator plugin obfuscates emails and URL links, to hide them from spam harvesters and Search Endigne crawlers. It uses ROT13 or cc8b to encode each link while PHP is building the page, then uses JavaScript to decode it and show it to the user. If JavaScript is not available, it uses CSS to hide them. It doesn’t use shortcodes, it works directly over HTML links, parsing and obfuscating them. By default it filters all texts in posts, comments, comments authors and text widgets, but you can manually use it anywhere you want. Basically, Hikari Email & URL Obfuscator plugin searches for links that contain URLs and emails on their href atrribute. For each found link, it is replaced by an obfuscated string, and a JavaScript function is called, having in its parameters the required data for JavaScript to decode and recreate the original link. The obfuscated string is then merged back by CSS to a readable URL/email text, so that human visitors can read it while spam harvesters and searchbots will not be able to detect it as a valid email/URL. And, for JavaScript-enabled visitors, this string is replaced by a link with the exact same behavior and attributes of your original link, so that they can interact with it as if there was no obfuscation in place! (Really, there is no way to diferenciate an obfuscated link generated by JavaScript from the original link, unless the HTML document’ source is verified or a development tool as FireBug is used!) It uses 4 obfuscation techniques, 2 JavaScript solutions and 2 CSS alternatives for JavaScript-disabled browsers. For CSS, it may revert the link string while PHP is building the page and then CSS reverts it back. Or it may add garbage text between the link, and CSS prevents this extra text from being rendered, so any user-agent that doesn’t use CSS can’t find the link but browsers show it clearly. Now, when JavaScript is available, it is delivered with the original link, encoded using ROT13 or cc8b by PHP. The link is then decoded back by JavaScript and added to the page, so that real users don’t even notice the original link was replaced. And, disregarding the used technique, we content publishers must do nothing different while building our content, just activate the plugin and it does everything else for us 🙂 I dedicate Hikari Email & URL Obfuscator to Ju, my beloved frient ^-^ Features Works instantly, no need to edit your posts to have your links obfuscated: Hikari Email & URL Obfuscator plugin automatically detects them and starts obfuscating as soon as it is activated. Unobstructive JavaScript: links are obfuscated and shown for visitors with and without JavaScript, forget those “you must enabled javascript to see this email” messages! They are real links!: any attribute you can use in an tag you also can use in obfuscated links (JavaScript version only). Customization: CSS doesn’t let we have real links, but we can at least choose if our obfuscated text will have email only, text only, or both! XHTML 1.1 valid: obfuscated links and JavaScript code are valid even in XHTML 1.1 standard. It makes the plugin valid inclusive in HTML 4.0, XHTML 1.0 Strict, XHTML 1.0 Transitional and HTML5! Advantages over other obfuscation solutions Your visitors will see your emails and URLs even if they keep JavaScript disabled. Automatic: you don’t need to take special actions to start obfuscating, as using shortcodes in place of links or an external tool to get your obfuscation code. Just normally use your links in your posts and let the plugin do the rest! Sitewide: instantly works in your existing posts, pages, comments and text widgets, just after you activate it. Diversity: for each link, it randomly chooses between 2 CSS and 2 JavaScript obfuscation methods, making it harder for spammers to crack it. Extensible: you can call it manually, and add it to other plugins and themes filters. Customizable: use custom parameters to force or avoid specific links from being obfuscated, and to define how non-JavaScript obfuscation will behave.