Spam protection, Honeypot, Anti-Spam by CleanTalk

Was great to clean out over 1000 spam accounts and prevent bot registrations. Only problem was lost sales due to woocommerce spam protection being on and stopping some checkouts. Had to disable that feature.

Clear Talk Anti-Spam was all I needed in conjunction with Imunify 360 to keep servers stable and free of abuse.

This past year has had me fighting against all of these AI bots and scrapers that use hundreds and even thousands of different IP addresses to continually scrape every page of every website. They are frequently from the same network using the first two octets.

I’ve had to write plugins that can track and detect abusive IP addresses up the chain and eventually block their entire IP address block of the most abusive networks (frequently Google Cloud, Microsoft Cloud and AWS server traffic) just to keep my sites available to real visitors. These bots will otherwise eat up every available connection slot and grind a site to a halt.

It’d be a 5 star rating, and was a 5 star in my book, but this year it is only a 4 star because these abusive bots and scrapers need to be addressed in 2026.

This may be a good plugin, but it is disingenuous not to be upfront that this is not a free plugin. It is only once you install it that you find this out.

Super happy with Antispam – couple of false positives, but soo much easier to deal with this than the buckets of bot enquiries

Works perfectly, super easy to setup and it just does what it needs to do!