Antispam Bee 2.10.0 published

Today we’ve released Antispam Bee version 2.10.0. A complete list of changes is available on GitHub.

New country detection service

To enable Antispam Bee to filter comments by country of origin, we previously relied on ip2country.info as a data-efficient and free external service. Unfortunately, due to a change of ownership and related setup changes, our API connection to ip2country has been broken for an unknown amount of time.

Since the service is closing its doors in the future anyway and moving to a paid model, we switched to another service called iplocate.io. This is limited to 1000 requests per IP. If someone needs more, then a filter can be used to specify an API key for the paid rates, or another service can be configured.

GitHub Issue #388

Improved plugin compatibility

There have been some compatibility issues with Antispam Bee in past versions due to our usage of output buffering.

Because we now add our honeypot (more WordPress-like) via a filter, various compatibility issues should be a thing of the past.

GitHub Issues #357 and #391

Pings are now filterable

As big fans of Webmentions, we’re pleased about this new feature. Even though there are currently no spam Webmentions, Antispam Bee is now prepared to check the new comment types for the Webmention plugin and other plugins.

GitHub Issue #224

User-agent for custom patterns

Besides the regular expressions the plugin itself uses to filter, Antispam Bee users* can define their own filters with a bit of code. Starting with version 2.10.0, these regular expressions can also access the stored user-agents of commenters, giving them a bit more data to work with.

GitHub-Issue #322

A bit of housekeeping

Of course, we regularly check if Antispam Bee is compatible with the latest WordPress and PHP versions. In addition, this time, we made slight adjustments to the color scheme of our interface to be even closer to what WordPress specifies.

We also cleaned up the links to our documentation to make sure all the information is still accessible.

And after we already renamed white- and blacklist in a past update in the interface, the wording in variables and option names is now also up to date.

Welcome Matthias Pfefferle!

After Matthias’ first contribution to the Antispam-Bee code was already in fall 2019, we are happy to finally welcome him as an official contributor.

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