Category: General

Well, this one took us a while. Getting Antispam Bee version 3.0 on the road was a years-long effort, and none of us would have expected it to take this long. Properly kicking off at CloudFest Hackathon in 2022, with plenty of hours of scattered contribution here and there. But now we’re very close to releasing a final v3. We just need a little help from all of you to get there. Help test this new version of Antispam Bee, the privacy-first, open-source spam protection plugin for WordPress. 

So, what’s actually new?

v3 is an important milestone for us. The big change is somewhat under the hood. It has a completely rebuilt engine: spam checks are now modular rules, and post processors decide what happens to a flagged comment, which makes the whole plugin way easier to extend and finally opens the door for other plugins to hook into it. The settings page has been redesigned but stays true to Antispam Bee’s nature as a minimal and no-nonsense plugin. For developers, there are new filters (honeypot styling and supported reaction types, among others) so they can bend ASB to fit their setup.

Help us and check it out

This is a beta, and we’d love your help. Many of us have been running the alpha versions on our websites for years now, so we’re fairly confident we’re onto something. But before we ship v3 to everyone, we want to hear from you. Grab beta 1 from GitHub, try it on a test site, and tell if something breaks, what feels off, and what you love.

Get Antispam Bee v3 beta.1 from GitHub →

Over the years, Antispam Bee has been carried by a huge number of people. Everyone who’s written code, filed an issue, translated a string, or simply kept it running on their site. To all of you: thank you. ❤️

Last month we achieved an important goal with Antispam Bee on WordPress.org. The plugin has now been downloaded more than five million times and is currently running on more than 700,000 websites. We want to take this opportunity to say thank you.

Thank you! ♥️

First of all, we have to thank Sergej Müller. Without his initiative, brilliant ideas, and countless invested hours, Antispam Bee would not exist today.

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This post originally appeared in Sergej Müller’s Google+ profile (in German) and is no longer accessible there. It’s now kept here by the Pluginkollektiv.

The antispam plugin for WordPress has a handy feature to allow comments only in a certain language – incoming comments in other languages are automatically classified as spam. See the description in the manual.

To be able to execute this option/function, the unofficial interface of Google Translation (Browser) API was used until now – the interface was free of charge and could be used without restrictions. Until a few days ago.

Google has now restricted the use of this unofficial interface in that it is no longer available for automatic scripts (which is a plugin). To use Google Translate API now, the paid version must be implemented. Sooner or later this time had to come 😉

Since the function is very effective in the plugin, I would not like to remove it from the feature set. On the other hand, I don’t want to pay the costs for API usage myself (I already pay Maxmind, etc.) – the uncertainty of usage alone worries me. Also I can’t/won’t want to make the plugin (partly) chargeable, because that would mean an enormous effort for me.

Summarized

Antispam Bee users with active option “Allow comments in one language only” have to expect that the filter will not work because the speech recognition does not work anymore.

I am thinking about a solution – feedback welcome 😉

Update 11 April 2015

In order to ensure the functionality of the mentioned function, a version of the plugin has just been put online with the use of the paid version of Google Translation API – until further notice I will cover the costs (whatever they may be). Also, the API consumption is to be determined/measured with it. After a few weeks, you will know more about how much the function and the translation interface behind it were used. Accordingly you can see the resulting costs.

Update May 03, 2015

Just got an invoice from Google: $55.22 at 2,696,066 units in the period 11.04. – 30.04 (so it’s only 20 days). Since it can be assumed that the plugin update was not immediately installed by all users, one would have to expect at least $90 per month.

Update May 16, 2015

With today’s plugin update, the two functions that are cost-related for me as a plugin author, allow comments in only one language and block or allow certain countries, have been removed from the plugin’s functionality. With a heavy heart, even if it is not easy for me to reduce the Antispam Bee functionality by such strong antispam filters 🙁

This post originally appeared in Sergej Müller’s Google+ profile (in German) and is no longer accessible there. It’s now kept here by the Pluginkollektiv.

I recommend not to delete spam detected by Antispam Bee immediately but to keep it in the WordPress database – the plugin option “Mark detected spam, do not delete” is responsible for this. The reason: If the function “Include local spam database” is activated, Antispam Bee considers already detected spam comments.

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This post originally appeared in Sergej Müller’s Google+ profile (in German) and is no longer accessible there. It’s now kept here by the Pluginkollektiv.

I didn’t want to deploy any more updates for the plugin this year, even though I was testing new antispam filters in the background. However, several users have asked me which plugin functions in this country are really safe from a privacy point of view? I have nothing to hide and have always described all functions in the online manual and provided them with corresponding privacy notices, which I have now revised. But I will summarize everything in clear words, no marketing blah-blah…

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