Description
Catfish Wrangler checks new comments, reviews, and uploaded images against the Content Guard API and flags anything suspicious with a color-coded badge in your WordPress admin — right in the Comments list and the Media Library, alongside content you already review.
What it checks for:
- Classic romance-scam language in comments and profile-style text (e.g. “stationed overseas,” refusal to video call, requests to move off-platform or send money)
- Generic template-style fake review language
- Whether an uploaded image looks AI-generated (via a live visual AI-detection model)
- Whether an image is missing the camera metadata a real photo would normally have
- Whether a profile’s photos are inconsistent with each other (some carrying real camera metadata, others not)
Safe by default. Out of the box, Catfish Wrangler only flags — it never holds or blocks a comment automatically. You review the flagged items yourself. Once you’ve seen it work correctly on your own site, you can turn on auto-hold (with a configurable sensitivity threshold) from Settings > Catfish Wrangler.
Requires an API key. Catfish Wrangler analyzes content using the Content Guard API, a paid, metered service — this plugin does not work without an account and an API key, which you enter yourself under Settings > Catfish Wrangler. Nothing is sent anywhere until you configure a key.
Why this matters
Dating profiles, marketplace listings, and review sections increasingly attract AI-generated photos and scripted scam text. This plugin gives site owners and moderators a heads-up on suspicious content without having to manually cross-check every submission.
External Services
This plugin connects to the Content Guard API to analyze comment/review text and uploaded images for signs of fraud or AI-generation.
- What is sent: the text of new comments/reviews, and newly uploaded image files, are sent to the Content Guard API for analysis.
- When: only when this plugin is active and configured with an API key — every new comment/review and every new image upload is sent for analysis at the time it’s submitted.
- Why: to compute the suspicion signals (scam-language patterns, AI-generation likelihood, metadata checks) shown as a badge in your admin area.
- Service URL: the API endpoint is configurable under Settings > Catfish Wrangler (defaults to
https://content-guard-production-24a7.up.railway.app). - Provider terms: Terms of Use / Privacy & Data Handling — this also discloses that image analysis is partly performed by a sub-processor, Hive Moderation (thehive.ai), under their own terms.
No data is sent to the Content Guard API unless you have entered an API key in the plugin settings — this is an explicit opt-in step.
Installation
- Upload the plugin files to
/wp-content/plugins/catfish-wrangler, or install it directly from the WordPress Plugin Directory. - Activate the plugin through the “Plugins” screen in WordPress.
- Go to Settings > Catfish Wrangler and enter your Content Guard API key (sign up for one at the API’s signup endpoint — see the plugin’s support page for details).
- Leave “Automatically hold flagged comments” off at first, and watch the Catfish Wrangler column in Comments/Media for a while before turning it on.
FAQ
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Does this work without an API key?
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No. The plugin needs a Content Guard API key to analyze anything. Without one, it does nothing (fails open — comments and uploads behave exactly as they would without this plugin installed).
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Will this block my users’ comments?
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Not by default. Out of the box it only adds a badge to the admin list. It only holds comments for moderation if you explicitly turn on “Automatically hold flagged comments” under Settings > Catfish Wrangler.
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Does this work with WooCommerce reviews?
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Yes — WooCommerce product reviews are stored as WordPress comments, so they’re covered automatically.
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What happens if the API is unreachable?
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The plugin fails open: if the Content Guard API can’t be reached, comments and uploads are treated exactly as if the plugin weren’t installed. Nothing is ever blocked due to an API outage.
Reviews
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Contributors & Developers
“Catfish Wrangler” is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.
Contributors
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Interested in development?
Browse the code, check out the SVN repository, or subscribe to the development log by RSS.
Changelog
0.1.0
- Initial release: comment/review text scanning, image upload scanning, flag-only-by-default mode, configurable auto-hold threshold.