Doesn’t seem to stop spam registrations

However, I noticed that some spam comments are still coming in, although it is considerably lesser.

I think this really sums up how anti-spam works in a nutshell. There’s no magical cure-all. Rather, we hope that the plugin out of the box solves a lot of issues. But, some attention to blocking the specific spam patterns you discover for your site specifically are important too.

It looks like your spammers mainly have subdomains in their emails. In your Protection Options, is the “Too Many Periods” setting checked?

Hi Bryan,

Thanks very much for your reply.

This morning I woke up to about 130 spam comments and 200+ spam accounts. I think the settings need to be a bit more aggressive?

I did not change many of your default settings. For the “Only Use the Plugin for Standard WordPress Forms (not recommended)” – I’ve changed it to Off instead of On. It doesn’t seem to be causing any problems.

I also set the Check for Quick Responses to 6 seconds.

The Check for Periods setting is also turned on.

Do you have any other suggestions or ideas?

Thanks for your time.

Kind regards,
E

And when I tell you the other common complaint is that the plugin is too aggressive, you’ll start to understand the dilemma.

There’s definitely no one-size-fits-all solution here, and there are infinite variables at play.

Ultimately, it’s up to you, the site owner, to find that perfect balance between slowing down spam, while also keeping things friendly and usable for your real visitors.

In this instance though, I can tell you the main line of defense is the “Too Many Periods” feature, and it actually needs some improvement. Unfortunately, all that I can offer you along those lines, is to hold tight for the next update.

Bryan, I can definitely understand what you mean with the dilemma.

In my case, do you think purchasing your premium plugin will help me at all? I apologise I am not very familiar with security/firewall so I don’t really know if your premium features might actually fix my problems.

No, the kind of spam you’re dealing with I refer to as subdomain spam, and this is a common pattern, that the free plugin should be dealing with. Clearly, it needs to be fixed.