WP Spam Free: Reducing Server Load

May 4th, 2010

WP Spam Free is a great antispam solution for WordPress. But if you ever checked your site loading speed in any of the site speed loading tests (we like to use Web Inspector in Safari), you surely noticed that the WP Spam Free's wpsf-js.php JavaScript file is taking too long to load. And no caching plugin will stop that if you want to have working comments.

WP Spam Free Loading - check out the wpsf-js.php item

The reason is that this plugin uses a unique random cookie to protect your blog from spam. And to generate the cookie name and value in the JavaScript file it includes all the WordPress code on every page load - thus slowing down the execution of your site's PHP code.

However there's a new experimental option in WP Spam Free which turns of this JavaScript while keeping the cookie anti-spam protection in. Here's how to turn it on

1. Open your WP Spam Free Settings page.
2. Add this to the location bar and press enter:

   &showHiddenOptions=on

3. This is what the location bar address will look like:

   ..../wp-admin/options-general.php?page=wp-spamfree/
   wp-spamfree.php&showHiddenOptions=on

4. You will have this extra option:

WP Spam Free - Hidden option

Now you will notice that the JavaScript for WP Spam Free is no longer loading. Let's give this option a try and find out how effective is WP Spam Free without the classic JavaScript cookie protection. Hopefully in new version of this plugin it will be tested and fully operational.

Right now, we are adding some anti-spam features to our comment moderation plugin Thoughtful Comments which will use zero extra resources and your server load won't be affected by it.

By Martin

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