Honeypot Comments

Description

No more need for captchas, making your readers jump through hoops in order to comment. Instead, activate this plugin and let a simple hidden honeypot input field catch spam bots, which will fill out all fields in the form (even our hidden honeypot field). If that honeypot field isn’t empty, the comment won’t process, effectively nuking most spam comments.

I also made sure that the id of the field is utilizing a random string of letters and numbers every time the page is loaded (ie: 34rscsDW37g8gf) so that spam bots can’t target a specific id name in order to bypass it, making it harder for the bots to win.

Installation is dead simple, just activate the plugin and you’re done. No other steps required on your end, the plugin handles everything.

Additional info

The basic structure of this plugin was cloned from the WordPress-Plugin-Boilerplate project.

This plugin supports the GitHub Updater plugin, so if you install that, this plugin becomes automatically updateable direct from GitHub. Any submission to WP.org repo will make this redundant.

Installation

1. Uzip the honeypot-comments.zip folder.
2. Upload the honeypot-comments folder to your /wp-content/plugins directory.
3. In your WordPress dashboard, head over to the Plugins section.
4. Activate Honeypot Comments.

FAQ

Why was this plugin created?

Because I hate captchas and I believe there is an easier way to tackle the spam comment issue with WordPress blogs.

What is the “honeypot” method?

This plugin adds a hidden input field into the WordPress comment section for your blog posts which is hidden to humans viewing the page. The spambots, however, see it and add info to it and get tripped up because the plugin will stop any comment that has the honeypot field filled in.

This will not stop all spammers, but will catch a lot of the bots that are written to fill out forms automatically since they’ll be filling out the honeypot field that this plugin adds in.

Reviews

Not effective

RoamingPro September 3, 2016

I’ve been interested in the Honey Pot concept for eliminating SPAM comments. I didn’t really delve into the code of this plugin to see what it was trying to do, all I know is that it is totally ineffective on several of my sites.

Contributors & Developers

Changelog

1.1.0

• Changed the way the ID for the input field was created, as it was pointed out to me that a sophisticated bot could figure out how I originally had the ID generated since it had honeypot-comments- in the ID name.

1.0.0

• Initial release