CleanTalk is the best anti form spam plugin we’ve come across.

In the last year or two we’ve come across a service/plugin called CleanTalk, and have found it to be one of the best at blocking form spam.   I don’t know how they do it,  but their plugin blocks out an outstanding amount of the form spam, with few – if any – false positives.

Form spam coming through your website is annoying and wastes your time.

Sometimes its the odd email here and there, but at other times you can open your inbox and find 100s of pieces of spam email that have come through your website.

Captcha plugins (I am not a robot) help to block this kind of spam, but its a constant back and forth.  Captchas get upgraded, then the spammer skills get better, and so it continues.

It’s a saga that has been going on as long as we’ve been building websites. Typically its spammers probing contact forms to test if they can exploit them for their own uses. Other times is just random sales messages that are clearly just crawling the web looking for contact forms to send though.

CleanTalk is not free, but at around $12/yr (USD) its almost a no-brainer (less if you have multiple sites). Once its installed you can pretty much forget about it. It provides a counter at the top of the wordpress admin, which you can click on for more stats, but other than that it pretty much just does its thing.

Check it out at CleanTalk, and/or if you’d like assistance setting this up on your site, give us a shout.

CleanTalk has a nice, if somewhat basic reporting dashboard, which if you have an account with multiple sites will show you the stats across all.