This is the first blog post of my “plugin advent calendar“. In the next 24 days, I want to cover plugins I use on my personal websites and websites I help maintain. I hope that I’ll be able to publish each of them at midnight every day.
Since I want to cover them in alphabetical order (with two exceptions), the first one had to cover one of the plugins I see as essential for any blog: Antispam Bee.
This plugin was developed by Sergej Müller and is now maintained by the Pluginkollektiv. Since I’m a member of that group as well, I also help to maintain it.
What does Antispam Bee do?
It blocks comment spam. It’s as simple as that. And it does it really really well. It has many different tactics to recognize spam comments and only from time to time, I have to moderate a pending comment as spam, since some spam comments are written manually by real people using comment content that makes sense to the specific blog post.
Does Antispam Bee also block other types of spam, like form submissions or sign-ups, you might ask? No, it currently does not. This was never a focus of the plugin. It only helps with comment spam, but here it does shine.
But this on only partly true. The Pluginkolletiv, so me as well, is working on a new version. This new version would also only work for comments out of the box. But it will offer an “API” that can be used for other things than comments. You use the “Contact Form 7” plugin for example to add a comment form to your blog? There might be a (third-party) plugin to integrate Antispam Bee with Contact Form 7 in the future.
Work on that new version was started some years ago, and since introducing a new version for such a successful plugin comes with a lot of risks, we really want to make sure it works for existing sites – Antispam Bee has currently 700,000+ active installations, and we don’t want to break any of those or make the spam protection less efficient. I’ve spent some time in my last holidays to test the spam protection efficiency of the new “work in progress” version with around 300,000 comments from my blog and the new version captured every single comment the current version did, just in a different (and even better) way. So I am very positive that 2026 will be the year that Antispam Bee 3 will finally be released. 🤞
Why I use Antispam Bee?
As I welcome comments on my blog posts – and I would love to see more of you commenting 😉 – I do get a lot of spam comments as well. Right now, I have almost 300,000 spam comments in my database (just for my English) blog, compared to a mere 634 comments that are not spam. You could say, I really need a plugin like Antispam Bee.
But why do I use it and not another plugin. I had been using a different anti-spam plugin for my English blog, as it worked better for comment spam in English many years ago. This was, probably, due to the fact that Antispam Bee was developed by a German developer for his blog and he got more comments in German. But many years ago, I replaced that other plugin with Antispam Bee on my English blog as well. Some of you might use Akismet, which comes pre-installed with WordPress, but unlike Antispam Bee, it is not privacy-friendly, and we Germans have a reputation, that we care a lot about privacy, and so do I.
Conclusion
If you do allow comments on your blog or website, and you do get comment spam, give Antispam Bee a try. Just install it and activate it. The default settings work very well for most sites and is not using any advanced techniques that are not as privacy-friendly. If you already use Antispam Bee, and you like it, why not give it a review on WordPress.org today?