JSMT Media is switching from Google reCAPTCHA to Akismet on contact forms for all of our hosting clients. While reCAPTCHA is free, they have become an outdated solution for spam filtering, and can lead to a variety of website issues. Akismet is a paid service that provides much more secure, accurate spam filtering that is well worth the low cost.
Read on for more information about Akismet and its advantages over reCAPTCHA.
What is Akismet?
Created by the company that built WordPress, Akismet is one of the oldest and most trusted spam filters on the market. It is one of the most popular WordPress plugins with over 5 million active installs.
Akismet filters contact form submissions and checks them against its global spam database to catch any harmful content. Users can view the spam that Akismet catches and see details about what it is and where it came from.
Contact form spam is more prevalent than ever and is getting smarter. Akismet’s algorithm is constantly learning and using new data to catch onto common spam trends and more accurately filter out spam.
Features of Akismet include:
- Integration with many top WordPress plugins.
- A global spam database and constantly learning algorithm to detect and filter spam.
- Easy setup and implementation.
- Automatically scans all contacts and filters out spam.
- Automatically discards the worst spam to reduce clutter and free up space.
- Users can view a status history to see what spam was caught by Akismet and whether any were seen by moderators.
Benefits of Akismet vs Google reCAPTCHA
While reCAPTCHA was a preferred free spam filtering option for a long time, they have become increasingly outdated and have several problems that can hurt user experience, including:
- Google reCAPTCHA can sometimes filter out legitimate contacts due to their difficulty.
- Google reCAPTCHA is much more likely to break or have problems than Akismet.
- Google reCAPTCHA is much worse for page speed than Akismet.
- Google reCAPTCHA is not as secure as Akismet.
- Spam has evolved to a point where it can bypass Google reCAPTCHA.
For these reasons, we are upgrading to Akismet for our hosting clients. If you have any further questions about this change, or contact form spam in general, please feel free to contact us.
