WordPress Antispam Bee Plugin Adds Option to Trust Commenters with a Gravatar

photo credit: Osmia pumila, M, Face, MD_2013-06-25.18.39.16 ZS PMax – (license)

Version 2.6.5 of the popular Antispam Bee plugin is out today with a new feature that allows administrators to trust commenters with a Gravatar. The idea for the function was suggested by Caspar Hübinger, a long-time user of the plugin.

“Have you ever seen a spam comment with a Gravatar image? I haven’t,” Hübinger said in a post introducing the new feature. “So I suggested to include an option in Antispam Bee to trust commenters with a Gravatar by default, and Sergej, creator of Antispam Bee, was kind enough to implement it.”

Although the plugin was mentioned by Matt Mullenweg during his Q&A at WordCamp Europe 2014, English speakers have largely overlooked it in the past. Antispam Bee was created by German WordPress plugin developer Sergej Müller and its description page on WordPress.org is written in German. He has actively developed and maintained the plugin since 2009. It is currently used on 200,000+ installations of WordPress.

One might think that it would make sense to include an English copy of the description to gain a larger user base, but Müller elected to keep it in German due to the plugin’s incompatibilities. Antispam Bee is incompatible with many of the major commenting systems used by English speakers, including Disqus, Jetpack Comments, and AJAX Comment Form.

English speakers who use Jetpack Comments often use Akismet, since the two work together seamlessly. Akismet is far more well-known, since it comes packaged with WordPress by default. However, Antispam Bee has a solid set of features that make it a decent alternative:

Ad-free

No storage of personal data

No registration required

Free for commercial projects

No adjustment required by theme templates

All functions can be controlled by the user

Statistics for the last 30 days displayed as a dashboard widget

Supports six languages: German, English, French, Russian, Dutch, and Slovenian

The plugin also comes with 20 configurable options for customizing its spam-blocking features, including the ability to disable spam email notifications, block comments from certain countries, allow comments only in certain languages, delete after X days, and much more. These options allow you to tailor your anti-spam shield to lessen your moderation load.

If you’re intrigued by Antispam Bee‘s latest feature that allows you to trust commenters who have a Gravatar, give the plugin a try the next time you’re reviewing spam-blocking solutions. The option is a creative use of WordPress’ built-in support for Gravatar. Current users of the plugin can find the new setting in the admin under Settings > Antispam Bee.