Quarivo Comment Shield

Activate it once. Quarivo Comment Shield quietly handles obvious spam.

Quarivo Comment Shield is a local, low-overhead comment spam filter built for site owners who want less notification noise without losing potentially important messages.

It combines several independent signals with three selectable protection modes. Balanced mode treats every language equally, while Japanese-site enhanced and Strict Japanese modes can apply a reversible site-language policy chosen by the administrator.

Three protection modes

• Balanced uses language-neutral behavior and content evidence. It is the default for non-Japanese WordPress sites.
• Japanese-site enhanced quarantines an untrusted non-Japanese first contact only when an external link or submitted Website supplies independent evidence.
• Strict Japanese quarantines every new untrusted comment without Japanese text. It is the default for Japanese WordPress sites and is intended for Japanese-only communities.
• Trusted users, exact allowed email addresses, and previously approved commenters remain exempt in every mode.
• A mode-based quarantine is never silently deleted. The original comment stays local, reviewable, restorable, and protected by the Review Safety Guard.

A review inbox designed for real work

• Shows WordPress-stored moderation candidates at the top.
• Opens the full original comment, author details, score, reasons, and history in an accessible modal.
• Prioritizes unread, lower-confidence comments that may need human review.
• Searches by author, email address, IP address, or comment text.
• Filters by quarantined, unreviewed, possibly important, confirmed spam, restored, and all states.
• Shows 25, 50, or 100 rows per page without loading the entire quarantine at once.
• Processes every matching result in small resumable batches, even when thousands are waiting.
• Protects every unopened comment scored 9 or lower from bulk spam confirmation until a moderator opens it.
• Allows deletion only after a record has been confirmed as spam or restored.
• Keeps confirmed-spam records visible in a dedicated one-click view until retention cleanup or an explicit deletion.
• Lets a moderator undo a spam confirmation without publishing the comment and reverses that learning vote.

Quiet protection with safe defaults

• Stops high-confidence automated spam before it enters the normal WordPress comments table.
• Uses a honeypot, cache-safe form token, timing signals, duplicate/rate checks, link patterns, and content heuristics.
• Recognizes compact machine-link promotions by compound structure instead of individual brands or destination domains.
• Recognizes compact bare-link drops through repeated destination, unrelated identity, generic invitation, and message-length evidence.
• Detects reward and payout lures only when a known shortened link and an immediate action prompt provide independent evidence.
• Detects gambling-link campaigns across several common scripts while exempting recovery, safety, warning, and research context.
• Suppresses comment notification noise only for comments intercepted by the plugin.
• Works with standard WordPress comments and includes compatibility handling for common AJAX comment flows.
• Requires no account, API key, CAPTCHA, or external service.
• Aggregates equivalent repeated spam into one review record and places a finite ceiling on unreviewed quarantine growth.
• Falls back to WordPress moderation instead of losing a comment when quarantine capacity is unavailable.

Conservative local learning

When a moderator restores or approves a false positive, or marks a comment as spam, the result is recorded locally. This works in both the Quarivo review inbox and the ordinary WordPress Comments screen. Repeated false positives can slightly reduce selected soft-signal weights. An exact author Website repeatedly confirmed as spam can add only a small supporting score when that same Website is also linked in a future comment. The stored Website key is hashed, expires after 180 days, and is capped at 500 entries.

Campaign similarity memory also creates versioned, non-readable signatures from human-reviewed comments. It normalizes URLs, rotating numbers, generated identifiers, and small wording changes so variants of one campaign can supply supporting evidence. A similar restored legitimate comment vetoes that learned spam score. Similarity never blocks a comment by itself, trusted commenters remain exempt, and automatic quarantine is never used as training data. Earlier retained moderator verdicts are imported in bounded, resumable batches after the update. If learning storage becomes unavailable, the import cursor is retained, a bounded retry is scheduled, and campaign matching fails open until storage is verified again.

Campaign signatures stay in the site’s database, expire after two years, and are capped at 5,000 entries. They survive normal updates and are retained by the default plugin-removal setting. If a moderator later corrects a verdict, the earlier versioned signature is replaced or removed rather than counted twice. Strong security signals are never weakened automatically.

“Publish and learn” can also allow the exact submitted email address. The plugin does not automatically trust a shared IP address or an entire email domain.

Privacy and retention

Quarantined comments and hashed campaign-learning signatures remain on the site’s own database and are not sent to an external service. The plugin integrates with WordPress personal-data export and erasure tools.

Unreviewed quarantined comments are never removed automatically. Equivalent repeated submissions are grouped into one record, and a finite admission ceiling prevents unlimited growth. When capacity is unavailable, comments fall back to normal WordPress moderation. Confirmed-spam and restored records are removed after the administrator’s selected retention period (30 to 365 days). Action history is retained for up to one year.

If WordPress deletes the plugin, Quarivo data is retained by default so possible false positives can be recovered after reinstalling. Administrators can first download a private JSON export or explicitly choose permanent removal under Settings > Data and removal. Permanent removal deletes only Quarivo tables, settings, learning data, and Quarivo comment metadata; ordinary WordPress comments, posts, users, and media are not deleted.