Get rid of spam comments using AntiSpam Bee plugin (Akismet alternative)

Once you start creating your website and launching it on the Internet, you will have to face many difficulties and challenges that website owners face. One of the most famous of these challenges, especially among WordPress users, is dealing with annoying or unwanted comments that come frequently and increase in number as your website grows or becomes more popular. Annoying comments are a very common thing on the Internet, and you must be careful to deal with them in the correct way by finding the appropriate way to prevent them so that they do not reflect a bad image to your site visitors if they are approved automatically or by mistake and so that you can respond and interact with the comments added by real users of your site without distraction. Also, if you receive thousands of annoying comments, it will be difficult for you to delete them manually.

It is not possible to get rid of annoying comments completely, simply because if you activate the comments feature on your WordPress site, every person who visits your website can add a comment, and it is possible that some users will add annoying or unwanted comments for one reason or another. The good news is that you can significantly reduce annoying comments and get rid of annoying comments that are added automatically, which constitute the largest percentage of this type of comments, which helps you protect users and save the effort and time you spend reviewing all comments manually and deleting annoying ones. In this explanation, we will learn about an add-on for WordPress sites that enables you to completely block annoying comments. It is a free and easy-to-set-up add-on that you can install and activate directly on your website to get rid of all those unwanted comments that are added to your site and that were a source of inconvenience for you and for your website users.

What are spam comments in WordPress? Providing comments within WordPress blogs means an opportunity to promote deceptive offers by some people. It is a means of deceiving users or marketing offers for products or services in an illegal manner. If you do not take the necessary measures to prevent this type of comments, this will negatively affect the user experience of your site and the performance and speed of loading pages when the number of comments increases significantly. Although spam comments can be added manually by some users, most spam comments are added automatically by robot programs designed specifically for this purpose. These programs enter a website and then try to add spam comments and then move to a website whose link is within the first site, and in this way until the robot program reaches your website and adds spam comments.

There are many problems that spam can cause to WordPress users. If the comments section is full of spam comments, it will be difficult for actual users to add their comments and have an effective discussion experience on your site. Spam comments also reduce users’ confidence in your website and make it appear unprofessional, indicating the site owner’s lack of interest in reviewing comments before approving them. Spam comments also affect the speed of loading your site by reserving space within the database and delaying the loading of articles. Possible options for getting rid of spam comments in WordPress There are many different ways to combat spam comments for WordPress users, and you can use one or more methods to get the best results. In the next part of this article, we will learn about the most popular methods that you can use in order to prevent spam comments on your website.

1- Review comments manually. This is the most effective way to block annoying comments by manually reviewing incoming comments from within the WordPress control panel before approving them. It is suitable if your website is small and does not receive many comments. It is of course a completely ineffective method for owners of large websites that receive a large number of daily visits and comments. 2- Adjust comment options within WordPress. WordPress comes by default with a set of options that can be set up to reduce annoying comments. You go to the (Settings) tab and then click on (Discussion) to enter the section for managing and adjusting comment settings in WordPress. 3- Reducing the number of links allowed in the comment. One of the distinctive features of spam comments is that they contain a number of links to external sites. Therefore, the number of links allowed in the comment can be determined so that comments that contain more than one link are blocked automatically. You can also enter the number zero to prevent adding any link in the comments section.

4- Prepare a list of prohibited words. Annoying comments often contain repeated words that are used to mislead the user. These words can be added to the ban list so that all comments that contain a prohibited word will be automatically deleted. Just be sure to choose the prohibited words carefully so that users’ comments are not deleted unintentionally. 5- Allow comments for registered users only. The goal of the person who adds annoying comments is to quickly promote his service or product without putting in much effort. Therefore, if you set to allow comments for registered users only, it will be more difficult for them to add annoying comments on your website. Also, most automated robots attempt to post spam comments without logging in to the site, so they will be prevented from posting when this feature is activated on your website.

6- Requiring approval of comments before they appear on the site. This feature is automatically activated again in WordPress in order to allow the site owner to manually review the comments and approve them before they appear on the site. However, we find that some owners of blogs, news sites, and magazines in particular deactivate this feature, which is something that we do not recommend. 7- Use the Akismet add-on. The Aksiemt add-on is often installed automatically on new WordPress sites. It is an add-on that is developed by the Automattic team responsible for developing the WordPress platform. The add-on reviews comments and compares them with a huge database of spam comments by comparing the Internet Protocol address used, or the words, or via email to the commenter. This method of working for the Akismet add-on is very effective, but it comes at the expense of consuming some of your hosting server’s resources in sending comments for review. It also obliges you to subscribe to the paid plan if you want to earn money from your website.

This means that using the free version of the Akismet add-on is only allowed for non-profit sites, meaning those sites that do not place ads or links for affiliate marketing, which makes many website and blog owners looking for the best alternative to this add-on. Read also: How to prevent spam from your WordPress site in all ways using the AntiSpam Bee plugin. This free plugin is considered very effective in getting rid of annoying comments in WordPress by automatically reviewing comments, comparing them with a huge local database, blocking annoying comments, and allowing comments from actual users of your site.

AntiSpam Bee extension is a free alternative

To add (Akismet), you can install it directly from within the WordPress control panel and activate it on your site. It is an add-on that does not require a registration process or the creation of a new account. All recommended settings also come activated by default, which means that you do not need to adjust many settings within the add-on control panel after installing it. In the next part of this article, we will learn how to install the AntiSpam Bee add-on, the most important features it offers, and how to adjust the add-on settings to get the best performance and block the largest possible number of spam comments.

The most important differences between the Akismet extension and AntiSpam Bee

The Akismet add-on works to prevent spam comments by sending all comments to the add-on server and blocking spam ones. This consumes some of your hosting server’s resources and sends sensitive user information such as name, Internet Protocol address, and email addresses to a third party, which is prohibited in many countries around the world. On the other hand, the AntiSpam Bee add-on automatically reviews comments locally without sending them to another hosting server, thus maintaining the performance of your website and the security and privacy of users’ data.

The Akismet plugin is a free plugin only for non-websites

For profitability, you need to subscribe to the paid plan to benefit from all the features of the add-on. It has the ability to filter incoming messages through the contact field of your site, and its compatibility with different types of comment systems used on WordPress sites. On the other hand, we find that the AntiSpam add-on is completely free and does not require registering a subscription or creating a personal account. You can use it freely on profitable sites without problems, but it is only compatible with the default comments system in WordPress and cannot prevent annoying communication messages. Install the AntiSpam Bee plugin and adjust its settings. To start using the AntiSpam Bee plugin, we go to the plugins section in WordPress, search for the name of the plugin, install it, and activate it on the site.

After installing the add-on, go to the (Settings) tab and then click on (AntiSpam Bee) to be directed to the add-on settings page. Here you will find a group of options that you can activate or deactivate, which are divided into three main groups. This set of settings (AntiSpam Filter) are the main settings that enable you to identify annoying comments and prevent them from appearing on the website. These are the settings that you must focus on so that the add-on can limit all types of annoying comments, identify them, and then delete them automatically.

1- Accept comments from trusted users (Trust approved comments): When this option is activated, the add-on identifies real users and allows them to comment and automatically approve their comments and prevents comments that include being added by automatic robots. 2- Accept comments from users who have a profile picture (Trust approved comments with a gravatar): Using this option, you can also allow comments only for users who have a profile picture. One of the distinctive features of annoying comments is that they are added by people or robots that do not post a profile picture. 3- Check the comment time: This feature stores the comment time and identifies a specific pattern in which annoying comments are added to your site, but this feature does not work well if the caching feature is activated on your website.

4- BBCode is a spam comment (BBcode links are spam): The BBCode is one of the signs that distinguish spam comments and has been used extensively in the past to add spam comments automatically in forums. When this option is activated, the add-on will identify comments that contain this code and not allow them to appear on your site. 5- Use regular expressions: There is a large group of common terms that are used in spam comments, which the AntiSpam Bee add-on can identify and delete automatically when this option is activated. 6- Searching the local spam comments database (look in local spam database): The add-on can search a local database to identify spam comments by comparing with previous site records. This method is effective and does not violate the laws regulating the sharing of user data on the Internet.

7- Block comments from specific countries (block or allow comments from specific countries): In this feature, you can specify specific countries to be added to the block list (Blacklist) and specify other countries (Whitelist) that are allowed to add comments on the site. 8- Allow comments only in certain languages ​​(allow comments only in ceratin language): In the same way as in the previous option, here you can specify only certain languages ​​for comments so that all comments in other languages ​​will be automatically deleted or added to the list of annoying comments. Settings Group (Advanced): This section of the add-on's settings is concerned with how it deals with annoying comments after identifying them, whether you want the add-on to delete these comments directly or just put them in the list of annoying comments.

1- Set as a spam comment and not delete: When this option is activated, the comments that are monitored will be set as spam only without being deleted. 2- Email notifications: If you would like to receive email notifications about every spam comment that is monitored, you can activate this option. 3- Not saving the reason for the annoying comment: By default, the add-on stores all the information related to the annoying comment, including the reason for marking the comment as annoying. However, if you do not want to store the reason for adding the comment to the list of annoying comments, you can activate this option.

4- Delete annoying comments after 5- Limit approval to comments or alerts: This option enables you to specify whether you want to approve comments only or alerts only. For example, if you select approval to comments only, incoming alerts will be automatically deleted. 6- Delete annoying comments based on the reason: The AntiSpam Bee add-on identifies annoying comments based on a group of different factors, and you can adjust the add-on settings to delete annoying comments based on the reason so that you can reduce manual work and delete annoying comments automatically.

A group of settings (Other): These settings enable you to add sections in the WordPress control panel that contain statistics about the number of spam comments that were monitored by the plugin, and you can activate them if you want to know the number of these spam comments that reach your website on a daily basis. 1- Setting statistics in the control panel: As is clear from the title, activating this option creates a section in the control panel that gives an overview of the number of spam comments that have been detected by the add-on. 2- Spam comments counter in the control panel: When this option is activated, a section will appear in the main WordPress control panel showing the number of spam comments that were detected during a specific period of time and the number of those comments that were deleted.

3- Not reviewing alerts: When your website is mentioned on another website, you receive a notification or alert about it in the comments section. By default, this add-on (AntiSpam Bee) reviews all alerts. If you wish to deactivate this feature, all alerts received on your website will be approved without review. 4- Review comments outside articles: Some templates enable users to add comments to articles displayed on the main blog page, article archives, or categories. When this option is activated, the plugin will also check these comments that are added from outside the articles. One final look: Spam comments are one of the most common problems that website and blog owners in particular suffer from. They are a source of nuisance for both the website owner who needs to review and delete them on an ongoing basis, and for website visitors who cannot engage in a constructive and regular discussion when there are a lot of annoying comments on articles.

Although it is possible to review comments manually from within the WordPress control panel, it is a tedious task and takes a lot of time and effort, so a group of plugins for WordPress have been developed that work to get rid of annoying comments and delete them automatically. One of the most famous of these add-ons, which is often installed automatically, is the Akismet AntiSpam add-on, which is developed by the same company that develops the WordPress platform. Although it is an effective add-on, it comes in a free version that does not allow it to be used on websites or blogs that make profit from the content through advertisements, affiliate marketing links, and other various methods of making profit. Therefore, many WordPress users are looking for the best free alternative plugin to get rid of annoying comments, and this reliable plugin is the free AntiSpam Bee plugin, which works to implement what is required and reduce annoying comments to a very large extent and does not require a subscription registration or complex settings.