Antispam Bee: Complete Configuration Guide for WordPress

Antispam Bee is the best free, privacy-compliant WordPress anti-spam plugin. It runs entirely on your server, handles both comment and registration spam effectively, and has zero data-sharing. But its default configuration is conservative – knowing which settings to enable makes a significant difference to how much spam it catches.

Understanding the Settings Panel

Go to Settings -> Antispam Bee. The options are organised into sections but the labels are not always obvious about what they actually do. Here is what each setting means in practice.

Spam Filters (Enable These)

Validate the IP address of the comment author – checks the commenter’s IP against multiple public blocklists (Spamhaus, etc.). Enable this. The only reason not to is if your audience uses corporate networks where IPs have been flagged – rare but possible.

Consider the comment time – calculates how long it took between the page loading and the form submitting. Real humans take at least a few seconds to read a post before commenting. Bots submit instantly. Enable this and set the minimum to 5 seconds. This alone catches a large percentage of bot submissions.

Allow comments from approved commenters only – once a commenter has had a comment approved, future comments skip the spam check. Useful for high-traffic blogs with repeat commenters.

Block comments from specific countries – use this only if you have specific country sources of spam that show up in your spam queue. Do not enable it as a general setting – it creates false positives for legitimate commenters.

Spam Filters (Situational)

Validate the email address of the commenter – checks if the domain has valid MX records. Good setting for sites where commenters are expected to have real email addresses. May create false positives with some legitimate corporate email systems.

Use a honeypot field – adds a hidden form field that bots fill in and humans do not see. Simple and effective with no privacy implications. Enable this.

Block comments with BBCode – BBCode (forum-style tags) appears almost exclusively in spam. Enable if you see BBCode in your spam queue.

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What to Do With Spam

Mark as spam and do not delete – keeps spam in your queue for review. Use this initially.

Delete immediately – permanent deletion, no review possible. Enable this once you are confident Antispam Bee’s false positive rate is acceptable for your site.

There is also an option to send spam statistics by email – useful on sites where you want a weekly summary without logging into the admin.

Customising With Code

Antispam Bee has several filters for developers. To whitelist specific email addresses from all spam checks:

add_filter('antispam_bee_trusted_emails', function($emails) {
    $emails[] = 'trusted@example.com';
    return $emails;
});

To adjust the minimum comment time (default is 5 seconds):

add_filter('antispam_bee_comment_min_time', function() {
    return 10; // seconds
});

To log spam reasons for debugging (adds a custom field to spam comments showing why Antispam Bee flagged them):

add_filter('antispam_bee_spam_reason_log', '__return_true');

Antispam Bee With WooCommerce

Antispam Bee handles WooCommerce product reviews automatically since they use the WordPress comment system. For WooCommerce registration spam, Antispam Bee’s registration protection covers the WordPress registration endpoint – but WooCommerce has its own registration flow on the My Account page. Enable “Protect the registration form” in Antispam Bee settings, which covers the WP registration page. For WooCommerce-specific registration, pair with a honeypot plugin that targets WooCommerce’s registration form specifically.