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Tests done by WP Hive test scriptResults
Minimal impact on memory usage The memory usage of this plugin is less than the average memory usage of other plugins on WordPress.org + 200KB. Check FAQ for more.
Minimal impact on pagespeed The impact of this plugin on PageSpeed is less than the average impact of other plugins on WordPress.org + 1000 milliseconds
No PHP errors, warning, notices WP Hive automated test found PHP error/s while activating this plugin on our server
No Javascript issues WP Hive automated test found no JavaScrip error while activating this plugin on our server
Latest PHP 7.4.8 compatible The latest version of the plugin is not compatible with the latest PHP version
Latest WordPress 5.9 compatible The latest version of the plugin is not compatible with the latest PHP version
Optimized database footprint The plugin creates less than 50 database tables
No activation errors WP Hive automated test found no activation error while activating this plugin on our server
No resource errors WP Hive automated test found no resource error/s while trying this plugin on our server
Frequently updated The plugin was updated at least once in the last 90 days
All the plugins are tested on the same server with exactly same configuration via test script that automatically activates and logs the data WP Hive shows.
All the scripts run on a VPS with 8 CPU cores and 8 GB of RAM.
The test sites are hosted on Google Cloud VM instances, one site/plugin per instance. The machine type is n1-standard-1. The server is a 8 core CPU with 8GB of RAM.
The test sites are hosted on Apache/2 server and they are tested on PHP 7.4.8 & WordPress 5.9.
The database server is MySQL 8.0.21 and the default PHP memory limit is 256M.
Supports: Contact Form 7, Contact Form by WPForms, Ninja Forms, Gravity Forms, MailChimp, Formidable forms, WooCommerce, JetPack comments and contact form, BuddyPress, bbPress, S2Member, MailPoet, wpDiscuz, any WordPress registrations & contact forms and themes. Just setup and forget the spam! No CAPTCHA, no questions, no animal counting, no puzzles, no math and no spam bots. Universal AntiSpam plugin. AntiSpam features....
Supports: Contact Form 7, Contact Form by WPForms, Ninja Forms, Gravity Forms, MailChimp, Formidable forms, WooCommerce, JetPack comments and contact form, BuddyPress, bbPress, S2Member, MailPoet, wpDiscuz, any WordPress registrations & contact forms and themes. Just setup and forget the spam!
No CAPTCHA, no questions, no animal counting, no puzzles, no math and no spam bots. Universal AntiSpam plugin.
AntiSpam features
Stops spam comments.
Stops spam registrations.
Stops spam contact emails.
Stops spam orders.
Stops spam bookings.
Stops spam subscriptions.
Stops spam surveys, polls.
Stops spam in widgets.
Stops spam in WooCommerce.
Checks and removes the existing spam comments and spam users.
Compatible with mobile users and devices.
Compatible with General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) (EU).
Real-time email validation. Is email real or Not.
Blocking disposable & temporary emails.
No Spam – No Google Penalties. Give your SEO boost.
Mobile friendly Anti Spam & FireWall.
Stops spam in Search Form.
Disable comments.
Public reviews
CleanTalk – Cloud-Based Anti-Spam Service to Keep Your Site Bot-Free. NewsWatch Review.
Using CleanTalk on WPLift was a great test as we receive huge amounts of spam. Oliver Dale, WPLift.com.
I know you have heard of a number of anti-spam plugins. But you must know, the cloud-based ones are the best regarding detection rate. They compare all the content in forms with their own algorithm to find out the legibility. www.techwibe.com
The key selling point of CleanTalk for me is not simply its effectiveness. It’s the fact that CleanTalk works in the background. It does not make users jump through hoops in order to submit a comment or complete a form. www.kevinmuldoon.com
Free trial then $8 per year
CleanTalk is a free anti spam plugin which work with the premium Cloud AntiSpam service cleantalk.org. This plugin as a service https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_as_a_service.
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.
Spam bots registrations filter
Filters spam bots on registration forms of WordPress, BuddyPress, bbPress, S2Member, WooCommerce, Profile builder, Login with AJAX and any other registration plugins.
Protection from contact form spam
The plugin is tested and ready to protect from spam emails via Formidable forms, Contact form 7, JetPack Contact form, Fast Secure Contact form, Ninja forms, Landing Page Builder, Gravity forms, Contact Form by BestWebSoft, Simple Contact Form Plugin – PirateForms, Visual Form Builder, Contact Form by WebDorado, Contact Form Email, MW WP Form, Contact Form by Jeff Bulllins, Contact Us Form, WCP Contact Form, WPForms Lite, Custom Contact, Forms, Caldera Forms, Visual Form Builder, Contact Form Clean and Simple, Divi by Elegant Themes, The7 theme and any other themes or custom contact forms, amoForms, Ultimate Form Builder, Contact Bank – Contact Forms Builder, Forms easily built with Smart Forms, Usernoise contact form, Contact Form by Web-Settler, HubSpot Marketing Free, QuForm.
WooCommerce spam filter
Anti-spam by CleanTalk filters spam registrations and spam reviews for WooCommerce. The plugin is fully compatible with WooCommerce 2.1 and higher.
Newsletters antispam filter
Anti-spam by CleanTalk filters spam subscriptions for MailPoet, MailChimp, PopupAlly and many other newsletter plugins.
Spam filter for theme contact forms
The plugin blocks spam emails via any theme (built-in ones included) contact forms. The plugin filters spam emails silently (without any error notices on WordPress frontend) in AJAX forms as well.
bbPress spam filter
Spam protection for everything about bbPress: logins, registrations, forums, topics and replies.
Other spam filters
WordPress Landing Pages.
WP User Frontend, UserPro.
Any WordPress form (checkbox ‘Custom contact forms’).
Any submission to the site (checkbox ‘Check all POST data’)
Compatible with WordPress cache plugins
W3 Total Cache, Quick Cache, WP Fastest Cache, Hyper Cache, WP Super cache, WP-Rocket and any other cache plugins.
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.
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.
Blocking users by country
Automatically block comments and registrations from the countries you have set a ban for. This option is useful in cases of manual spam protection and for protection enhancement. If your site is not intended for international audience and you do not expect comments/users from other countries.
Blocking comments by “stop words”
You can block comments which contain “stop words” to enhance spam protection and messages with obscene words blocking. You can add particular words or phrases.
Private black lists for anti-spam service
Automatically block comments and registrations from your private black IP/email address list. This option helps to strengthen the spam protection from a manual spam or block unwanted comments from users. You can add not only the certain IP addresses, but also a separate subnet to your personal black list.
Private black list for Spam FireWall
It allows you to add individual IP addresses and subnets to Spam FireWall. It blocks the spam attacks from IP addresses which are not included in the SFW base yet. This option can help to block HTTP/HTTPS DDoS, SQL, brute force attacks and any others that made it through the HTTP/HTTPS. You can add not only the certain IP addresses, but also a separate subnet to your personal black list.
Low false/positive rate
This plugin uses multiple anti-spam tests to filter spam bots having as low false/positive rate as possible. Multiple anti-spam tests help to avoid false/positive blocks of the real website visitors even if one of the tests failed.
How effective is CleanTalk?
Accurately blocking spam is not an easy thing to do, but CleanTalk has a very low proven False/Positive rate. Here is actual statistics on false positives for all customers.
Registrations – 0.007%
Comments – 0.001%
Contact forms – 0.001%
Orders (WooCommerce) – 0.008%
The statistic was calculated on November 10 2017 for 1 million requests.
How CleanTalk improves SEO for your website?
So, you already know that the speed of the site has a direct impact on SEO.
CleanTalk works faster than most of the other anti-spam plugins. It is common knowledge that the faster your site loads, the better your customer experience is, the better your SEO will be, and the better your site will convert. Speed is becoming increasingly important in SEO, conversion and user experience. Today, site speed is one of the most important ranking factors on Google. A site that loads slowly will lose visitors and potential revenue.
There are different ways of improving your site’s loading performance. One important parameter for site performance is to install well-developed plugins from a reputable source.
Among anti-spam plugins CleanTalk AntiSpam is one of the fastest. Despite the large plugin functionality, the developers have optimized the performance of the plugin so that AntiSpam by CleanTalk is faster than most analogs. This contributes to the cloud service architecture, as all calculations take place in the cloud, not on the server, the server receives the finished result for further action.
Anti-Spam by CleanTalk plugin sends action parameters into the CleanTalk cloud
Service analyzes the parameters
If this is a visitor, the comment will be published. If it’s a spam bot, then CleanTalk blocks this comment or registration.
Parameters are written to the spam log which can be viewed in the Control Panel service.
CleanTalk team has been developing a cloud antispam system for five years and has created a truly reliable anti-spam service designed for you to guarantee your safety.
Spam attacks log
Service CleanTalk (this plugin is a client application for CleanTalk anti-spam service) records all filtered comments, registration and other spam attacks in the “Log of spam attacks” and stores the data in the log for up to 45 days. Using the log, you can ensure reliable protection of your website from spam and no false/positive filtering.
Spam FireWall
CleanTalk has an advanced option “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.
Spam FireWall is fully compatible with the most popular VPN services. Also, Spam FireWall supports all search engines Google, Bing, Yahoo, Baidu, MSN, Yandex and etc.
How Spam FireWall works?
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 DDoS Protection
Spam FireWall can mitigate HTTP/HTTPS DDoS attacks. When an intruder makes GET requests to attack your website, Spam FireWall blocks all requests from bad IP addresses. Your website gives the intruder a special page with the description of DDoS rejection instead of the website pages. Therefore Spam FireWall helps to reduce CPU usage of your server.
XML-RPC brute force protection
Spam FireWall can mitigate XML-RPC brute force attacks. It blocks XML-RPC attacks from bad IP addresses. This helps to prevent bruteforce attacks by a Remote Procedure Call.
No spam comments, no spam registrations, no spam contact emails, no spam trackbacks. CAPTCHA-free anti-spam for WordPress
Spam is one of the most irritating things. Spam rates are increasing every year and conventional anti-spam can no longer handle all spam bots. CleanTalk prevents and automatically blocks spam. You’ll be surprised how effective CleanTalk is in protecting from spam.
AntiSpam plugin info
CleanTalk is an all-in-one antispam solution for WordPress that protects login, comment, contact and WooCommerce forms at once. You don’t need to install separate antispam plugins for each form. It allows your blog to work faster and save resources. After installation you will forget about spam; your CleanTalk plugin will do all the work. You won’t have to deal with spam as CleanTalk does this for you automatically.
CleanTalk is a transparent antispam tool, we provide detailed stats of all incoming comments and logins. You can always be sure that there are no errors. We have developed a mobile app for you to see antispam stats wherever you want.
We have developed the antispam for WordPress that protects you from spam bots at the maximum level allowing you to provide your visitors a simple and convenient form of comments/registrations without annoying CAPTCHAs and puzzles. CleanTalk detects spam in multistage tests allowing us to block up to 99.998% of spam bots. The anti-spam method offered by CleanTalk avoids inconvenient for communication methods (CAPTCHA, question-answer etc.), and offers to your site visitors a more comfortable one.
CleanTalk is a premium anti-spam service for WordPress, the plugin works with our own CleanTalk Cloud Service. Anti Spam by CleanTalk offers a free trial, you can look at the pricing here. We provide anti-spam services at the highest level. To maintain this level we cannot afford to offer a free version of our service, as this will immediately affect the quality of the providing anti-spam protection. Paying for a year of anti-spam service, you save a lot more and receive:
Up to 99.998% protection from spam bots.
Time and resources saving.
More registrations/comments/visitors.
Spam protection of the several websites at once in different CMS.
Ease in installation and using.
Traffic increase and loyalty to the users.
24/7 technical support.
Clear stats.
Spam FireWall.
No captcha (reCaptcha), puzzles, etc.
Free mobile app to control anti-spam protection on your website.
Additional features
Daily and weekly detailed anti-spam reports: traffic VS spam.
Apps for iPhone, Android to control anti-spam service, comments, signups, contacts, traffic and spam stats for the last 7 days.
AntiSpam apps for most popular CMS on cleantalk.org.
How to protect sites from spam bots without CAPTCHA?
The most popular anti spam method is CAPTCHA – the annoying picture with curved and sloping symbols, which are presented to the visitor to decipher and fill in. In is supposed that spam bots won’t discern these CAPTCHA, but a visitor will. CAPTCHA provokes great irritation, but if the visitor wants to comment, he has to fill in these symbols time after time, making mistakes and starting once again. 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
You do not have to work in IT to know what spam is. Besides piles of unwanted email, there are spam bots, or special software programs designed to act as human website visitors that post unwelcome messages over the Internet to advertise dubious services. More often than not spam messages do not even make sense. Similar to bacteria and virus mutations developing antibiotic resistance, spam bots are becoming more resilient in penetrating Internet firewalls and security layers.
CleanTalk’s features
Anti-Spam by CleanTalk with Spam FireWall is one of the fastest plugins that allows you to lower the server load. One of the important parameters for each webmaster is the speed of the site, so we make sure that our plugin consumes as few server resources as possible. The Cloud Service provides the advantage: all data processing takes place in the Cloud.
CleanTalk team has developed unique anti spam algorithms to assess visitors behavior. CleanTalk analyzes user behavior and the parameters of the filled forms. Our anti-spam module, being installed in your website, sends the behavior parameters of either a visitor or a spam bot. When these parameters are estimated, the anti spam service makes a decision – to post a message or to define it as spam and reject it. Based on these checks, the service forms its own list of email addresses used by spam bots.
The registrations of visitors are being checked in a similar manner. The service adds to the blacklist not just email addresses, but also IP addresses and domains of websites that promote themselves through spam mailing. All of this happens automatically and requires no action from the administration of the website. In 2.5 million queries the service makes a mistake in 40-45 cases, i.e. CleanTalk detects spam with 99.9982% accuracy. We constantly monitor these errors and make adjustments to our algorithms. Even with this exceptional accuracy our team is aiming to improve the figures over time.
All-in-one. CleanTalk protects form spam all forms instantaneously – comments, registrations, feedback, contacts. No need to install additional plugins for each form. You save resources and increase performance of your website.
Spam attacks log. Anti-Spam by CleanTalk records all filtered comments, registrations and other spam attacks in the “Log of spam attacks” and stores the data in the log for up to 45 days. Using the log, you can ensure reliable protection of your website from spam and experience no false/positive filtering.
With the help of anti-spam by CleanTalk you can check existing comments and users, to find and quickly delete spam comments at once. This allows administrators of websites to automatically check and identify spam bots, comments and users, which were not detected by conventional anti-spam tools. The existing comments and users checking process is performed in a database of the nearly 2 million identified spam bots. Detailed spam stats allows CleanTalk customers to fully control it.
CleanTalk has an advanced option “Spam FireWall”. This option allows you to block the most active spam bots before they get access to your website. It unloads you website pages when an attempt attack was made, so your web server won’t run unnecessary scripts on these pages. Also it prevents any scanning of website pages by spam bots. Subsequently Spam FireWall significantly reduces your webserver load. Spam FireWall can mitigate HTTP/HTTPS DDoS attacks. When an intruder makes GET requests to attack your website, Spam FireWall will block requests from bad IP addresses. Your website gives the intruder a special page with a description of DDoS rejection instead of the website pages. Spam FireWall can help to reduce the CPU usage of your server because of this reason.
“CleanTalk team has been developing a cloud spam protection system for five years and has created a truly reliable anti-spam service designed for you to guarantee your safety”.
White Label Mode
To switch the plugin work in the white-label mode you should set up a few settings on your main site in WordPress Multisite Network:
Check setting “Enable White Label Mode”.
Fill “Hoster API Key” field with key from CleanTalk’s hoster panel.
Fill “Plugin name” field. It could be any name you want for the plugin.
Save settings.
The plugin will do everything rest.
Auto-Update CleanTalk AntiSpam
CleanTalk Dashboard allows you to set auto-update plugin and select several websites and update the plugin at once on all sites by one click or you can setup auto-update for all websites or separate websites.
Note: there is 24 hours delay before auto-update will do. This delay allows needing to avoid any issues. All updates that made through CleanTalk Dashboard manually will do immediately.
Auto-updating system will work from CleanTalk AntiSpam version 5.88
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,
Spam FireWall blocks access to all website pages for the most active spambots. It lowers your web server load and traffic just by doing this.
Anti-Spam protection for website search forms repels spambots.
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 spambots.
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.
Translations
Albanian (sq_AL) – thanks to fjalaime https://wordpress.org/support/users/fjalaime/
French (fr_FR) – thanks to Gilles Santacreu http://net-ik.net
Spanish (es_ES) – thanks to Andrew Kurtis and WebHostingHub
Requirements
WordPress 3.0 at least. PHP 5 with CURL or file_get_contents() function and enabled ‘allow_url_fopen’ setting. The plugin is fully compatible with PHP 7.
Max power, all-in-one, premium anti-spam WordPress plugin. No comments & registrations spam, no contact spam, protects any forms. Just install and forget spam.
Read More >>
Performance
Memory Usage
Average memory usage is317.23 KB
This is less than83%plugins
Page Speed
Average page loading time is increased by 0.04 s
This is faster than99%plugins
Speed Test Benchmark Learn more how we collect the data
Before plugin activation
After plugin activation
Pages
Benchmark
Change
Average Change
+ 0.04s
/(front page)
- 0.02s
/wp-admin/edit-comments.php
+ 0.04s
/wp-admin/edit-tags.php?taxonomy=category
+ 0.01s
/wp-admin/edit.php
+ 0.14s
/wp-admin/index.php
+ 0.05s
/wp-admin/media-new.php
- 0.07s
/wp-admin/options-discussion.php
+ 0.07s
/wp-admin/options-writing.php
- 0.12s
/wp-admin/post-new.php
+ 0.13s
/wp-admin/post-new.php?post_type=page
+ 0.25s
/wp-admin/upload.php
- 0.09s
MoreLess
Memory Usage Benchmark Learn more how we collect the data
Before plugin activation
After plugin activation
Pages
Benchmark
Change
Average Change
+ 317.23KB
/ (front page)
+ 26.29KB
/wp-admin/edit-comments.php
+ 43.81KB
/wp-admin/edit-tags.php?taxonomy=category
+ 44.69KB
/wp-admin/edit.php
+ 35.69KB
/wp-admin/index.php
+ 36.25KB
/wp-admin/media-new.php
+ 44.57KB
/wp-admin/options-discussion.php
+ 44.53KB
/wp-admin/options-writing.php
+ 42.45KB
/wp-admin/post-new.php
+ 37.03KB
/wp-admin/post-new.php?post_type=page
+ 36.34KB
/wp-admin/upload.php
+ 44.55KB
MoreLess
User Rating of Anti-Spam by CleanTalk from WP Hive Users
We found the following errors while activating the plugin. Read more how WP Hive generates this data.
[03-Feb-2022 10:57:54 UTC] PHP Notice: Undefined offset: 0 in /wp-content/plugins/cleantalk-spam-protect/lib/Cleantalk/Common/Helper.php on line 590
[03-Feb-2022 10:57:54 UTC] PHP Notice: Trying to access array offset on value of type null in /wp-content/plugins/cleantalk-spam-protect/lib/Cleantalk/Common/Helper.php on line 590
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Pros & Cons: This is a review from the Editorial staff of WP Hive for test purposes. We are sure the plugin made it with good heart for WordPress users and we want to encourage his/her efforts by the first review.
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Pros & Cons: This is a review from the Editorial staff of WP Hive for test purposes. We are sure the plugin made it with good heart for WordPress users and we want to encourage his/her efforts by the first review.
Overall:The plugin should be working great. Even if it does not, we respect the time and effort. If you are using this plugin - leave a review with more information.