Effective anti-spam that is non-invasive to the users…but it is much more

I had seen this plugin for a couple of years though never tried it, but when I saw that the Roots team –the developers of Sage, Bedrock and Trellis– had WPBruiser in their ‘Favorite WordPress Plugins’ list then I decided to give it a try. This was in December 2018.

The first impression was good:

• Sleek UI
• Tons of features anti-spam wise
• Surprisingly quite a few features security wise –enough to even think about using them instead of Wordfence (which I love by the way)–.
• Extensions to integrate WPBruiser with ‘Contact Form 7’ and ‘Quform’, both of which I extensively use.
• Free integration with the ‘HTML Forms’ plugin by ibericode –I almost cried of joy as it is my favorite forms plugin–.
• Free integration with ‘W3 Total Cache plugin’.
• Reports, charts, maps and statistics to help monitor all the blocked spam attempts.

Well, after half a year using it in some of my sites, with a paid extension included, I must say I am very impressed. It has done the job nicely and by nicely I mean:

• 99.999% effective. Sites that were being spammed several times a day could finally rest. In 7 months only 1 spamming message made its way through in one of the sites.
• Performance has remained intact. I have to confess I usually go a bit over the top in terms of performance with my sites and –having conducted empirical measurements–I did not notice any significant impact on the speed in any of them .
• Everything has kept working harmoniously. I have not experienced any incompatibilities with other plugins or themes –including ‘W3 Total Cache’ heavily configured–
• The plugin runs smoothly on the backend.
• I have not had the need of support but I did ask a question to the developer and got a kind reply after a few hours.

Overall, my impression is that we are looking at a beautifully coded plugin that offers a ton of features, both anti-spam and security wise, offering a superb UX –for the admin (backend) and end users (frontend)– and which is widely compatible with other plugins, robust and effective.