AOS Comment Spam Cleanup

AOS Comment Spam Cleanup helps you remove comment spam in bulk using URL pattern matching, and prevents future bot submissions with a honeypot and quality scoring. Whether you have hundreds of shortlink spam comments or want ongoing protection, this plugin has you covered.

It works alongside Akismet and other spam filters, not instead of them.

✨ What you can do

🔍 Pattern Scanner
Type a URL fragment (e.g. shorturl.fm) into the scanner, click Check Count to see exactly how many comments match, then choose your action: mark as spam, move to trash, or delete permanently.

👀 See the matches before you act
A count tells you how many, not which ones. Show matches lists the matching comments — author, comment excerpt, the post it sits on, the date and the current status — so you can spot a pattern that also catches real comments before you run an action that cannot be undone. The list is read-only and closes itself whenever the pattern changes, so it can never describe a different search than the one in the field.

⏱ Scheduled Auto-Cleanup
Set a WP-Cron job to run hourly, twice daily, daily, or weekly. Configure your patterns and action once — the plugin keeps your comment section clean automatically.

🤖 Honeypot Bot Protection
An invisible form field is added to your comment form. Real visitors never see or fill it. Bots that automatically fill every form field get rejected with a 403 error — silently, without affecting real users who never see or fill the field.

📊 Comment Quality Scoring
Every new comment is automatically scored based on:
– Number of external links (+2 per link)
– Shortlink in author URL (+4 points)
– Very short text under 15 characters (+2 points)
– High symbol/punctuation density (+3 points)
– Known spam keywords like “casino” or “viagra” (+3 points)
– Excessive ALL-CAPS usage (+2 points)

If the score exceeds your threshold, the comment is held for review or marked as spam automatically.

🚫 Gravatar Privacy (GDPR-friendly)
Optionally block all external requests to gravatar.com. When enabled, avatar images are suppressed completely, preventing third-party data transfers without visitor consent — helpful for GDPR / DSGVO compliance.

💬 Disable Comments Globally
Close comments and trackbacks / pingbacks on all posts, pages, and custom post types in one click. Existing comments are not deleted — only new submissions are blocked. Disabling the toggle restores original comment status immediately without any database changes.

🛡 WordPress Blocklist Integration
Add URL patterns directly to WordPress’s native disallowed_keys list — new comments containing those patterns are caught before they even reach the scanner.

📋 Spam Domain Analysis
Automatically scans your existing spam and trash comments to surface the most common offending domains, so you always know what to block next.

🎯 Who is this for?

• Site owners who suddenly find hundreds of shortlink spam comments (you know who you are)
• Bloggers who want passive spam protection without a heavy third-party service
• Developers managing multiple WordPress sites who need efficient bulk moderation
• Anyone frustrated by shortlinks like bit.ly, shorturl.fm, cutt.ly in their comments

❓ Why not just use Akismet?

Akismet is great for real-time filtering — but it doesn’t help you clean up existing spam, and it doesn’t support pattern-based bulk actions. AOS Comment Spam Cleanup fills that gap. Use both.

🔒 Privacy

This plugin does not collect, transmit or store any personal data on external servers. All processing happens on your own server. No external API calls are made during normal operation.

🌍 Translations

Ships with English and German (de_DE). Help translate at translate.wordpress.org.

👨‍💻 Developer

Made by AOS Digital — WordPress development from Germany.