When you add a comment to a WordPress page or post, the form asks for your name, email address, the text of your comment, and… your website URL.
This seems an odd design choice on the part of the WordPress developers. As the owner of a website, is there really a benefit to you if visitors who comment have a special place for links to their website? Doesn’t it encourage people to make frivolous comments just for the opportunity to boost their site’s SEO by having robots add links to your blog pages (and hundreds of other blogs)? Did you create your site so others could use it to promote their brands?
In fact, this field is the whole reason for a lot of spambot activity. They come to your site to make some stupid flattering comment just so they get to add a link to their scammy site.
The plugin I’m reviewing here, stops that by removing the Website field from the comment form. If they can’t find the field they want to fill in, most spammers won’t bother to post the comment, and if they do post, and it gets past your other filters, at least it doesn’t do them any good.
This seems to me like a super good idea. Super good. The WordPress developers should just delete that silly field and make this plugin unnecessary.
The plugin also can remove links from the text of the comments. This is probably a good idea also, but it does keep people from providing citations to support their comments, so depending what kind of site you run, this may not be desirable.
See also: Antispam Bee plugin