AntiSpam Plugin for WordPress from BitDefender

In the past Akismet was a good solution and still is (we will talk about it in a future article), but many of the users quit this service because of false-positive results that appear sometimes and Bad Behaviour was also a good solution in the past, but recently some new variants of antispam plugins for WordPress and the one that follows is one of them. In this article, we will discuss about the plugin developed by BitDefender.

While tested a parallel with Bad Behaviour, you can see that it escaped a spam. Then if you restst the product without another solution agains spam messages, it may escape a message now and then, but as you use it frequently, the escapes will become less (detected messages are marked as [ Bitdefender SPAM ]).

The plugin is still in beta phase, so it is being developed. The plugin runs stable and you cannot tell that something is annoying in that plugin. Still, the interface can be a little improved. Probably it will be in the future.

How does it work?

Every time a blog visitor will click submit or post, his or her comments are checked by BitDefender servers. If the server decides that one message is spam, is marked as such, otherwise it will appear on your blog or kept in moderation (depends on how the administrator sets this in WordPress). Installation:

1. From WordPress Dashboard / Plugins choose Add New;

2. Upload and choose the previously saved archive of the computer;

3. Install and then Activate;

4. Enter a valid e-mail address in the BitDefender Client ID field.

In conclusion, if you need a solution to block spam, that is used on the WordPress platform, the plugin coming from BitDefender is worth trying. BitDefender AntiSpam Solution for WordPress is somewhat similar to using Akismet well known that uses a central server for analysis and marks a comment as spam or as a valid comment. To test the plugin created by WordPress, you better deactivate other plugin that you use against spam messages, as a safety measure, and also to enable the option to automatically transmit the first comment into moderation. And after almost a week you can draw some conclusions.

The plugin has been tested on WordPress 3.0 beta2, which is updated daily with the latest available version, and it worked without any problem of incompatibility. After activation go to Plugins – BitDefender Antispam for the administration panel. I would have liked the submenu to be placed somewhere more visible, easily accessible; under the Dashboard menu would be quite a good idea since the Updates submenu can be found there starting with the version 3.0.

Administration interface, statistics

Download and install the plugin, enter a valid email address that works as a KEY, and select the language used for writing the blog. Admin panel is very Spartan in terms of graphics, but we can overlook this aspect, because this is a version still in testing. But you do not have any confirmation message of the user’s actions as well. This is a little bit too much. In the first day of the testing, the user might not even know that this works or not, so you can go about every hour in the blog management interface to see if the plugin is working. This is weird.

As with Akismet, you get statistics on the number of valid comments and spam comments. Nothing impressive, but I think there is a feature that is valuable.

In addition, you have a detailed log of the comments and of the decisions taken. Searching in the log and inserting an IP on a black list can be done easily with a single click. The log is automatically deleted after 30 days, range which can be configured by the user. Clicking on the ID of a comment will lead you to the page with that comment.

Detection rate

Regardless the way the administration interface looks like, the most important characteristic of this plugin is the detection rate. Although initially had an escape, two, when a spam was classified as legitimate a few minutes after the exact same spam was considered to be a true spam message, it behaved honorably and most likely you can continue to use it in the future without going back to Akismet.

The plugin was not tested on the most trafficked blog which exist today, but on a blog with a considerable number of comments, but whatever the situation, we must learn from our mistakes  learn from mistakes and this is exaclty what the antispam solution from BitDefender did: throughout the test, the detection algorithm was improved. So, you have to use it a while in order to obtain the best results. It is like the speech to text software applications, where you have to have a training session with the computer, in order for the computer to recognize how you pronounce certain words, your accent, intonation and so on.

Conclusions

The detection rate is acceptable, I’m sure it will improve if it is used on a larger scale. With an interface more friendly, which will be better after several months (don’t despair!), and with the addition of clear warning messages, that are  understandable to the less technical user, this could probably result in an interesting plugin.

I recommend you to test the plugin even if you are only regular users of WordPress, and if something worth mentioning will intervene, regarding the plugin development, I will return with an article. In conclusion, BitDefender, well done! If you have used this solution on your blog, we wait for your comments.11