Includes a mandatory firewall that will block your users – [Spam Master] Review

I’ve tried to use this plugin for several years, but frequently something would go wrong and the author would tell me that there was nothing wrong, until I literally gave them a patch to fix the problem. This happened several times over the years.

More recently, they added a “firewall” feature which degrades performance and increases load on a server (because apparently a firewall should send blocked users a redirect to itself, so you then get 20+ requests to WP for a blocked page, instead of 1 successful request). Furthermore, my clients kept getting many reports from users that the website was inaccessible due to this “firewall”.

After contacting the author, they didn’t want to add anything in the UI to disable it, but they agreed to add a DB setting that would allow me to disable it. Another release a few weeks later, and they removed that option again, and then pretended we never agreed anything and refused to allow this dumb feature to be disabled.

So, after many years, I’ve completely given up on this, it will cause all sorts of problems over time and I can’t recommend it at all anymore. All I wanted was a simple anti-spam plugin that worked without inline JS.