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Hi,
I use Wordfence plugin and I also have a plan on Cloudflare.
I wonder if Akismet is really useful, or perhaps I delete it?
Thanks for any advice
I am aware that Akismet is a plugin for spam, but also Wordfence blocks spam, in real time, and also Cloudflare being a CDN service.
For this reason, I was wondering if maybe Akismet becomes useless.
Maybe I'm wrong, but my opinion is that Akismet is overrated.
Akismet has been less than useless for me since version 2.5, when they added commentmeta histories that it never cleans up, despite the assurance in the old description that it does (the newer descriptions no longer have that claim). I didn't discover how huge a problem this was until version 2.5.8 or 2.5.9 however, when I discovered on one of my busiest sites that the commentmeta table alone had grown to a little over 50Mb in size.
See http://crunchify.com/akismet-and-wp_commentmeta-how-to-clean-up-comment-meta-in-wordpress-database/
And to date, it still doesn't clean up after itself, and one might think they've given up trying to make it do so, except there's a plugin called WP Conditional Captcha that enhances Akismet's findings, and has an option to disable Akismet's feature for creating the comment histories.
Akismet is still needed to prevent spam on Gravity Forms submissions (but I will gladly jump in line for any GF anti-spam alternatives that come along), but on sites where I'm not using Gravity Forms, I have switched a number of my sites over to using the WP Spamshield or Zero Spam plugins, and if I can, on new installations I delete Akismet so those comment histories never begin to collect.
WordPress / Genesis Site Design & Troubleshooting: A Touch of Summer | @SummerWebDesign
Slice of SciFi | Writers, After DarkDeactivating Akismet does not clean up the histories in the commentsmeta table. The only way to keep it in check is to either manually run that SQL command every month or two, use Akismet with the WP Conditional Captcha, or replace Akismet entirely.
I started learning about this cleanup journey 2 years ago, when I realized I couldn't move a site because the database was too big to import into the new location (without using FTP and mysql from the shell), and I began looking for reasons why. The site I mentioned was getting several hundred real comments and several thousand spam comments per week, with spam spikes as high as 2500 per day during peak spamming holidays (or something).
Unfortunately, other than blog posts about how to fix this issue, not many people seem to care, and most of the rest continue to sing Akismet's undying praises that it can do no wrong. Beg to differ 🙂
WordPress / Genesis Site Design & Troubleshooting: A Touch of Summer | @SummerWebDesign
Slice of SciFi | Writers, After DarkSince I installed a plugin called Anti-spam By webvitaly, Akismet is useless for me and I deactivated it.
With Akismet I used to spend at least an hour a day moderating suspicious comments or just deleting spam caught by Akismet on my 50+ sites.
This plugin stops ALL atomated spam using javascript. Now only once in a while I need to moderate manually added spam.
Same for me with WP Spamshield... I've gone from needing to moderate a couple hundred comments per day across 3 sites, down to maybe 5-10 comments a month total across those same 3 sites, and WP Spamshield stats say that one of those sites is still receiving 800 spam comments per day that I NEVER see.
It's a beautiful thing.
I'm also testing out Zero Spam alone on one site, and so far so good. Can't hurt to have a backup where spam is concerned.
WordPress / Genesis Site Design & Troubleshooting: A Touch of Summer | @SummerWebDesign
Slice of SciFi | Writers, After DarkHi...
May be try BruteProtect https://wordpress.org/plugins/bruteprotect/ It is also acquired by JetPack recently, and will merge soon to JetPack. Worth to try at least.
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