Review: AntiSpam Bee WordPress Plugin
Someone recently complained that using JetPack's Akismet anti-spam plugin wasn't very privacy friendly.
So, because I take every minor complaint as a personal rebuke, I decided to switch to AntiSpam Bee - an open source and local antispam solution.
And... it's pretty good! There is the occasional false negative - but not significantly worse than JetPack.
Most of the false negatives are from non-English language comments:

There are settings so that you can reject comments which aren't in your native language. But that comes with privacy implications.
I didn't spot any false positives - but I get hundreds of spam comments per day.

It's a little more fiddly than Akismet. But, as a power user, I appreciate that. It's also less reliant on a centralised service - who knows what weird AI grab Akismet will do with all the comments it moderates?
You can grab the source code from GitHub
Verdict |
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@Edent Yes. I use it for years and it's very good.
@Edent another point is that Akismet licence terms are that it is not free on the majority of sites ( for instance your blog as you advertise yourself for freelance counts as 'commercial' ) and at approx $60 per year Akismet is not cheap.
@Edent Oh wow, awesome! 🤩 Glad you are happy with it!
(And sorry if my comment came across as a rebuke. Now that I read it again it could have been worded better. 😐 )
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