Protection for Leaky Paywall covers all submissions made through WordPress plugin Leaky Paywall. Anti-Spam by CleanTalk for WordPress must be installed as well.
Delegate control of your websites to other accounts at CleanTalk.org.
We’ve been testing this integration since January 6, 2025, it’s firm and stable by now. Anyway, if you have any questions or issues, just drop a message in the comment section down below.
Review forms are among the most vulnerable parts of any website. That’s exactly why, in order to protect them effectively, using a WordPress plugin to stop spam in reviews is not just helpful — it’s essential. If you’re using the Site Reviews plugin for WordPress, you’ve likely seen fake reviews, spammy links, or even automated bots flooding your site.
You just spent 30 minutes deleting 17 fake reviews. And yet, tomorrow, there will likely be 25 more. As a result, it becomes a familiar — and frustrating — cycle that wastes time and drains energy.
Why You Need Spam Protection for Site Reviews in WordPress
Manual moderation quickly becomes unmanageable. Likewise, simply hiding forms doesn’t solve the problem. In both cases, the real issue remains untouched — automated spam submissions from bots and crawlers that specifically target testimonial and review forms.
If you’re searching for a way to stop fake reviews in WordPress, a dedicated anti-spam plugin is the most reliable option.
How CleanTalk Works to Stop Review Spam in WordPress
CleanTalk Anti-Spam provides direct integration with the Site Reviews plugin. It filters every form submission before it’s published, blocking anything suspicious automatically — without affecting real users.
Here’s how CleanTalk helps:
One plugin for all WordPress forms In addition to reviews, CleanTalk also protects comments, contact forms, login forms, and registration pages — offering full-site anti-spam coverage.
Seamless integration with Site Reviews plugin Better yet, CleanTalk automatically detects review forms and works right out of the box — no configuration required.
Stops spam before it hits the WordPress dashboard In fact, you won’t even see the spam. CleanTalk blocks suspicious submissions in real time, keeping your admin panel clean and distraction-free.
Cloud-based filtering with zero impact on site speed Unlike many plugins, CleanTalk does all the processing in the cloud. Your WordPress site stays lightning fast.
Invisible anti-spam protection for users As a result, users won’t encounter any interruptions or confusing fields. Instead, the form remains fast, simple, and easy to complete.
Compatible with any review form setup Whether you use shortcodes, modal popups, or custom implementations, CleanTalk has you covered.
Detailed spam logs and activity reports Easily review what was blocked and why — great for troubleshooting or analytics.
Real Results: Preventing Fake WordPress Reviews
For example, on a WordPress site with over 300 monthly reviews, CleanTalk blocked 87 fake submissions in just one week — all without a single false positive.
Behind the scenes, the plugin filtered spammy review attempts using IP blacklists, content analysis, and behavioral patterns. Meanwhile, real users experienced no interruptions whatsoever.
How to Get Started with CleanTalk Anti-Spam Plugin
Go to your WordPress admin → Plugins → Add New.
site reviews spam for wordpress 1 1
Search for “Spam protection, Anti-Spam, FireWall by CleanTalk.”
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Click Install, then Activate.
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In plugin settings, click Get Access Key Automatically, then Save Settings.
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Your Site Reviews plugin is now protected.
Already using WPForms, Contact Form 7, or WooCommerce review forms? CleanTalk works with them too.
Stop Review Spam in WordPress and Protect Your Testimonial Forms Effortlessly
If you’re a small business owner, developer, or store admin, spam reviews can damage credibility and waste time. CleanTalk offers the easiest way to:
Prevent fake reviews from bots and link spammers
Stop spam in WordPress review forms without CAPTCHAs
Improve customer trust by keeping your reviews section clean
Save hours on manual moderation
Don’t wait for your reviews section to be overrun. One plugin. Five minutes. Zero spam
Looking for more ways to reduce fake reviews and spam in WordPress? The WordPress Plugin Directory features hundreds of tools — but very few offer real-time protection like CleanTalk. Choosing a proven solution helps keep your testimonials section clean and trusted.
CleanTalk added spam protection for Paid Membership Subscriptions forms using direct form integration. So in case, you prefer using this type of contact forms be sure to use the most effective Anti-Spam plugin. Read the guide below and learn 4 steps to protect all your contact forms from spam.
Once the CleanTalk Anti-Spam plugin is installed it starts to protect all of the existing forms on your WordPress website. It may not only be Paid Membership Subscriptions Forms but also many others.
To install the Anti-Spam plugin, go to your WordPress admin panel → Plugins → Add New.
Then enter «CleanTalk» in the search box and click the Install button for «Spam protection, Anti-Spam, FireWall by CleanTalk».
After installing the plugin, click the «Activate» button.
After it is done go to the plugin settings and click the «Get Access Key Automatically» button. Then just click the «Save Settings» button.
That’s it! From now you How to completely protect your Contact Forms from spam.
How to check Paid Membership Subscriptions Forms Spam Protection
You can test the work of Anti-Spam protection for your Contact Forms by using a test email s @ cleantalk.org (without spaces). First, open the form in an Incognito browser tab. Fill in all the required form fields and send a form. After submitting the form, you will see a block message about the block on the form submission.
screen
If you have any questions, add a comment and we will be happy to help you.
Create your CleanTalk account – Register now and protect your Contact Forms from spam in 5 minutes
Update
The protection works only for website visitors, not for website admins. Be sure to test the form protection using Incognito mode.
Additional features
CleanTalk protects all forms at once: comments, registrations, feedbacks, contacts, reviews.
Installation takes about 1-2 minutes.
Smart 99% protection against spambots.
Always online – 24/7 technical support.
Logs, SpamFireWall, personal lists, country filters, stop-words, and many others.
Discover the complete list of CleanTalk Anti-Spam plugin features here.
Earlier, we introduced the Holiday Form Decoration feature in the Anti-Spam plugin, allowing website owners to add festive designs to their WordPress comment forms. We have noticed that it did not receive the level of interest we initially anticipated.
After evaluating user feedback and adoption rates, we have decided to remove this feature from the Anti-Spam plugin in the upcoming release 6.51. This decision allows us to focus on developing and improving features that provide greater value to our users.
If you have any thoughts on this or would like to suggest new enhancements, feel free to share your feedback. We always strive to improve our plugin based on what truly matters to our users.
Thank you for being part of our community and for your continued support!
Spammers often use fake email addresses to hide their identities and avoid consequences for their actions. This can lead to a deluge of spam comments, registrations, and other unwanted activity on your website. To combat this, CleanTalk Anti-Spam has always had a powerful feature: Non-ExistentEmail Notification. But now, this feature has evolved to a new form—to be useful not only for site owners but also for site visitors!
Now, if the email you’ve entered into a form is somehow non-existent (for example, you made a typo in it), you’ll see it right away. No confusion, no hassles, no pain!
How it Works:
When a user submits a form (such as a comment or registration form) on your website, CleanTalk’s system instantly checks the validity of the provided email address. If the email address is found to be non-existent or invalid, the user will receive an immediate notification.
An email is existent.
An email is non-existent.
Benefits:
Real-time feedback: This provides immediate alerts as you type, highlighting potential errors or typos in your email address.
Simple visual cues: Clear indicators like checkmarks or warning icons can quickly show whether an email address is valid or invalid.
Experience the Difference
By implementing CleanTalk’s Non-Existent Email Notification feature, you can significantly enhance the usability of your website while minimizing the impact of spam, and a new aspect of this feature provides even more comfort for your visitors!
With this update, we polished CleanTalk Anti-Spam to do what it’s supposed to do the best. And here’s what was improved in the plugin in more detail.
What Did We Do
Reducing jQuery Dependency
Why jQuery? jQuery was often included to handle some JavaScript tasks but sometimes added extra weight to your website.
New Approach: We replaced jQuery with native JavaScript where possible. This will reduce the amount of code needed to load and parse, hence offering faster page load times.
Simplify Handling of AJAX
AJAX and Anti-Spam: AJAX helps perform real-time anti-spam checks. However, incorrect AJAX requests may make your website slow.
Improved AJAX: We further improved our AJAX handling by reducing the number of requests and enhancing the data transfer process. This will keep the anti-spam checks lean without interfering with the user experience at all.
The debug_ajax Option
The debug_ajax option was only given for development purposes and seldom, if ever, used in production environments. To make the plugin core even slimmer, we removed this option.
comments__manage_comments_on_public_page Option
That is when comments need to be enabled on a public page. Comment visibility and comment moderation make the option work seamlessly without compromising security.
Results
With these optimizations, you will be guaranteed that your website-essentially pages with an active comment section see a significant improvement in speed and performance that will positively reflect in the visitor experience with better SEO rankings and hence a better overall user experience.
Let’s see what PageSpeed Insights has to say:
Before
After
Update Today
We recommend that you update to the latest release of CleanTalk Anti-Spam to take advantage of these performance enhancements.
Automatic Update:
Check for Updates:
Go to your WordPress admin dashboard.
Navigate to Plugins > Installed Plugins.
Locate the “Anti-Spam by CleanTalk” plugin.
You’ll see a “Update Now” button next to the plugin name.
Update the Plugin:
Click the “Update Now” button.
WordPress will automatically download and install the latest version of the plugin.
We are always looking for ways to improve your experience with website security. As such, we will sunset the Frontend Malware Scanner within our plugin on December 1st, 2024.
Why the change?
After evaluating the data we can certainly say that very few of you use the front-end malware scanner. While it is a nice feature, it has just not been that popular.
Also, this scanner is not as effective as we expect it to be.
So, we’re putting our energy into the stuff that counts. We will spend most of our time on the parts of the security tools that you use and love. This way, we can keep your website safe and sound without all that extra hassle.
Where will this take us?
We’re focusing our resources on making our Malware Web Scanner even more powerful! This robust tool scans and blocks threats in real time, ensuring your site stays protected from the latest online dangers. If you’ve been using our Frontend Malware Scanner, consider switching to the enhanced Malware Web Scanner to experience its full potential in safeguarding your site. To identify potential vulnerabilities and security risks, it will analyze websites for:
Malware external links
Public blacklists
Exposed repositories
Internal links
SSL certificates
CMS identification
Server information
What does this mean for you?
Don’t sweat! All the other security features within the plugin will continue to work just fine.
Even more protection: We keep going further with the online scanner to make it even stronger in protecting your website.
Questions?
Our amazing support team is here for you. Just email them, and they will answer if anything crosses your mind. Thanks for your understanding! We look forward to serving you more with the best website security.
We’ve been busy bees making your personal area widget even more helpful. Now you’ll have a clearer picture of how we’re protecting your site from spam. And a special shout-out to those of you who shared your thoughts – your feedback is what helps us make these improvements!
Clearer Spam Count: The “blocked spam” count now specifically reflects the number of spam requests blocked over the past year. This provides a more relevant overview of your spam protection activity.
Comprehensive Data: The graph now includes data from both Anti-Spam and SpamFireWall, giving you a complete picture of all blocked requests. This helps you better understand the overall effectiveness of your security measures.
Precise Terminology: We’ve updated the widget’s wording to be more accurate and avoid confusion.
The widget title has also been updated to “7 days Anti-Spam and SpamFireWall stats”
“Spam attacks” has been changed to “Requests were blocked by Anti-Spam and SpamFireWall”
“Spam blocked” in the legend is now “Requests blocked”
We’re excited about these changes because it means you can relax knowing you’ve got a clear picture of your spam protection and any potential trouble brewing. And this is all thanks to your awesome feedback! We love working together to make things better.
We’re on a mission to make your experience top-notch, and you’re a big part of that! Your feedback helps us steer the ship in the right direction. So if you ever have a suggestion or spot something that could be better, don’t hesitate to let our support team know. We’re a team, and we love working together to make things awesome!
Not all your website traffic is genuine. Hidden within your analytics are bots – automated programs that can mimic human behavior. Think of them like little robots that visit your website and pretend to be people. While some bots are harmless (like the ones that help Google find your site), others can cause trouble. They can clog up your contact forms with spam, create fake accounts, and even place phony orders. Those fake traffic bots are like a bunch of party crashers at your online store who aren’t there to buy anything, just to cause a mess!
Just how big is this problem?
Well, studies show that up to 30% of all web traffic might actually be bots! That means almost one in three “visitors” to your site might not be a real person. And when it comes to contact forms, things get even worse. Experts say that up to 40% of all form submissions could be spam generated by bots. That’s a lot of wasted time and effort dealing with junk! Even registrations and orders can be affected, with estimates suggesting that 10% of new accounts and 5% of online orders could be fake.
Why should you care?
These sneaky bots can cause a lot of headaches for businesses. They can:
Waste your time: Dealing with spam messages and fake accounts takes time and effort away from real customers.
Mess up your data: Bots can make your website statistics unreliable, making it harder to understand how real people are using your site.
Hurt your reputation: If your contact form is full of spam, it makes your business look unprofessional.
Cost you money: Fake orders can lead to financial losses and logistical nightmares.
So, what can you do about it?
Imagine having a super-smart bouncer for your website, someone who can spot fake traffic bots before they even get through the door. That’s what CleanTalk Anti-Spam and Security plugins do! They’re like a 24/7 security team dedicated to keeping your website safe and clean.
Here’s how CleanTalk helps protect your forms and keeps spam away:
CleanTalk is a pro at protecting all kinds of forms on your website, from contact forms to registration forms and even order forms. It checks every submission to make sure it’s from a real person, not a spam bot trying to cause trouble.
CleanTalk can even help you get rid of spam that’s already on your website. It can scan your comments and other content to find and remove those spam links that bots leave behind.
CleanTalk is like having a dedicated team of experts protecting your website, making sure your forms are safe, your content is clean, and those pesky bots are kept far, far away
