Concise Antispam

Concise Antispam is a simple plugin for spam prevention. It installs in one click, does not demand any additional tuning, and fights most of the typical spam attacks.

How it Works

After rendering the page to the user, the system inserts the field “antispam_token” in every form. Then, after the first user interaction with the form, the system requests the token value from the backend. Backend generates the token, and saves it to the database, then returns the token to the Frontend. Frontend puts the token value into the field “antispam_token”.

After form submission, the system validates the existence of the token and its value.

Who is the enemy?

The main foes are the automatic spam bots. Algorithm of the plugin is based on common bots’ behaviour: most of them check all the site pages looking for the forms and then fill and send those forms. Concise Antispam prevents this kind of attempt by adding additional fields which can be filled with valid values only after the first user interaction.

What is the difference?

Concise Antispam is not the only product on the market, but it has following key differences from the other systems:

…from Honeypot

Honeypot-based systems also add additional field, but the validation idea is different from Concise Antispam: they check that the bot does not fill the additional field. However, many spam bots try to fill as few fields as possible making this kind of checking weak against them.

…from Services

There are a lot of other well-known antispam services such as Recaptcha, Akismet, etc. These services are third-party systems and often demand additional payments. These solutions have the following negative sides:

• Each check demands a request to the third-party service. Thereafter, any problems with service or transport between service and the main system will also affect the central system.
• The check system is a black box that the main system cannot change. It creates an additional layer of problems in the case of false-positive checks.
• Such systems can demand additional javascript code into the main system execution, which can decrease SEO score.

For Developers

Despite the absence of settings, developers still have the ability to change plugins behaviour if they need to include or exclude some forms on the site manually. It can be done using the standard hook mechanism described in the documentation.

Links

Github: https://github.com/concise-studio/concise-antispam
Download: https://wordpress.org/plugins/concise-antispam