Human Presence Reviews

This plugin seems to work fine but I am little apprehensive about what is considered spam and what isn't. I can see how many suspicious submits were blocked in absolute terms but I'd rather have the added option to have them put in a spam folder so that I can see if legit submits are not being blocked so I can set the Human Confidence level properly. Simply putting a value without knowing what is being blocked is very risky and may make me lose business.

I purchased and immediately started using Human Presence back in February 2022 and loaded it on about 30 sites that are mine and my clients.

I simply do not trust the plugin for subscriber and/or contact forms, plain and simple.

There's no way to verify that what the plugin considers non-human submissions are really non-human submissions. You cannot test out the plugin by submitting your own form(s), because the standard reply from the developers is that the plugin must have detected spam-like activity.

It's almost like you're being gaslighted. "If you don't see anything happening, then that's how you know it's working."

Not only did it almost cost me a client, that client is a lawyer and was threatening to sue me because of the 300 form submissions that were sent through her contact form that was "protected" by Human Presence only 20 submissions were seen as valid and allowed through. It was only after she talked to a few people who told her they tried to submit her form that she let me know that there was a problem and accused me of potentially cost her money from potential clients.

After avoiding litigation and not losing that client's business, I went through all my sites and all my clients' sites where I'd installed and activated Human Presence and saw the same pattern of super high rejections and very few submissions being let through. Human Presence does not store those submissions for you to go through and decide whether to whitelist or delete them. They exist nowhere, because the person trying to submit the form isn't actually allowed to submit the form. They get an error message and nothing goes through, but Human Presence registers their attempt as suspicious.

Again, I simply do not trust the plugin when it comes to subscriber and/or contact form submissions.

I gave it three tacos, because I intend to only use it for comment forms.

Many of my clients and I are not concerned with whether people can leave comments. Also, after removing the plugin from a few client sites, they all [within a day] informed me that they started receiving a lot of comment spam. When I put the plugin back on their sites and limited it to only protecting the comments form the comment spam stopped within hours.

So... The plugin is not totally useless, but as I mentioned before I do not trust it with my or my clients' subscriber and/or contact forms and will only use it for the comments forms going forward.

In my point of view, WordPress plugins should always be on top of the game regarding updates. Anything else, is a potential security risk that could be exploited. When you check the plugin page of Human Presence, you see that the last update was 5 months ago and it is not tested with current wordpress-version.

That´s why I can only give 3 Tacos so far. I´ll provide some update once I tested the antispam a bit more.

Man, this thing really works. Love this plugin!!!

I used it for a month or so and am not happy with this. The advantage may be that the plugin is very easy configurable just by defining the value of a detection threshold.
The great disadvantage is that it didn't work. It blocked everything when I installed it even with threshold 0. Support reply was very slow. The plugin suddenly worked without changing anything and now, after publishing a new form on the existing page it blocks again everything.
Since you can't adjust anything you really don't know how it workes and you can't retrace where the problem is. I don't rely on this. how can I be sure that no real contacts are blocked?