Stop Spammers vs Comment Experience by Progress Planner (formerly Yoast Comment Hacks)
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| Feature | Stop Spammers v2026.6 · checked 23 Oct 2026 Free + paid · ★ 4.4/5 Visit Details | Comment Experience by Progress Planner (formerly Yoast Comment Hacks) v2.1.6 · checked 23 Oct 2026 Free · ★ 3.5/5 Visit Details |
|---|---|---|
| At a glance | ||
| Active installs | 20,000+ | 500+ |
| Last updated | July 18, 2026 | November 10, 2025 |
| Editions | Stop Spammers Classic | Comment Experience |
| Pros | Checks IPs against StopForumSpam, BotScout and Akismet; Captcha challenge on login, registration and comment forms; Allow list, block list and activity reports | Free, GPL licence; Cleaner comment notification emails; Optional comment policy that commenters must accept; Minimum and maximum comment length |
| Cons | Legacy build; new features are not planned; Successor Dam Spam is the recommended plugin; Several external lookups send visitor IPs to third-party services | Changes core comment behaviour, so test it on a staging copy first; Does not add spam filtering or storage; Notification email links point at an IP lookup service |
| Mentioned in our posts | 1 | 1 |
| More features | ||
| Other features | Spam checks run on each request at init, Captcha challenge on login, registration and comment forms, Checks 404 hits for exploit-scanning bots, Allow list and block list screens, Reports of caught spam, Tor exit node and hosting-provider checks, Logs IP address on user registration and login | Comment policy that commenters must accept, Minimum and maximum comment length, Cleaner comment notification emails, Filtered comment notification recipients, Mailto link on comment rows, Redirect after posting a comment, Comment Experience settings page |
| Integrations | ||
| Plugins | Akismet | Progress Planner |
| Other | StopForumSpam, BotScout, Google reCAPTCHA, hCaptcha, Solve Media | — |
| Requires WordPress | 5.0 | 6.6 |
| Requires PHP | 5.0 | 7.4 |
| Tested up to | 7.0 | 6.8 |
| Phones home | No | No |
| External services | www.google.com, hcaptcha.com, verify.solvemedia.com, www.stopforumspam.com, botscout.com, rest.akismet.com, api-secure.solvemedia.com | — |