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For what seemed like forever, this was the very best antispam plugin I could find. It was simple, unobtrusive, and it worked remarkably well. Just a really impressive piece of software. That changed, out of the blue, in December of 2019, when the plugin apparently came under new management, and the resulting update broke the plugin in almost every way.
Gone was the simplicity and unobtrusiveness. Suddenly the plugin was spamming my dashboard for me to upgrade to a pro version and leave a 5-star review. (I noticed many people did leave 5-star reviews, no doubt reflecting their time with this plugin before this calamitous update.) I get that companies need to make money — pro versions are not unreasonable — but the in-your-face advertising was unfortunate.
Even then, I would not have been writing this if the new version worked as well as the old one. But, despite claims on the support forum that this new version was better (not sure how it could be), in fact just the opposite happened to me: the plugin suddenly became a hole, allowing spammy comments left and right to trickle through. I had no choice but to take it down and replace it with a competing plugin. That competitor is not as good as the old Anti-spam — I’d previously left it for this plugin — but it’s the best of the rest, and right now that will have to do. It’s disappointing.