“cannot this of circumstances” should be “cannot think of circumstances”
Hello datastream,
Unfortunately, at this point, all requests from the site have already been deleted from your log after the storage period expired, so we cannot understand what caused the false positives.
Please activate our plugin, clear the site cache (if any), and let us know. We will run some tests.
Hello Eugene,
After this experience there is absolutely no way I will ever use the CleanTalk plugin again. As explained, had it not been for extraordinary circumstances I would not know that genuine customers had been blocked.
Sincerely,
Barry Brunning
Hello @datastream,
We are sorry to hear that. If you change your mind and decide to reactivate the plugin, we’ll be happy to investigate the issue.
Alternatively, is it possible to create a staging website and reactivate the plugin there?
@datastream,
One more thing: the plugin needs to be activated only temporarily so we can run our tests, and for security, it is better if you contact us via our private support ticket system, as we might need some private details about your website.
Please follow this link to open a ticket: https://cleantalk.org/my/support/open
Thank you.
Hello @datastream ,
Thank you for bringing this to our attention. We understand how upsetting this situation must have been.
Our tests were unable to reveal any problems with the service. CleanTalk works correctly on a very large number of websites every day. However, in some cases issues like this can happen due to technical factors on a specific site.
Most often, this is not caused by the spam-detection logic itself, but because the plugin is unable to receive all the necessary data from the website or from the visitor. When some important information is missing or altered, the system may make an incorrect decision.
To understand what happened on your site, we need to check what data the plugin was actually receiving. This involves running a few simple diagnostic tests. The process usually takes about 10–15 minutes and does not affect visitors or site functionality.
Please contact our support team using the link below, and we will perfom all the tests ourselves.
https://cleantalk.org/my/support/open
Once we identify the cause, we are confident the issue can be resolved.
Kind regards,
Hello Aleksandr,
I appreciate the attention you are paying to this issue. However, on the balance of risk (genuine customers being blocked again) I am not prepared to reactivate the plugin at the present time.
Fortunately, the original reason for installing CleanTalk (prevent nefarious people registering on the website) no longer seems to be an issue (possibly due to improvements in Wordfence or Siteground security?).
We are a small company with limited resources to deal with this amongst many other important issues. At some future time if traffic grows and we encounter problems that CleanTalk might mitigate, we may try again and hope to avail ourselves of your help then. But for the time being, I’ll mark this issue as resolved, but sadly in the negative sense that we’ve deactivated the plugin.
Regards,
Barry Brunning
Hello Barry @datastream ,
Thank you for your detailed reply and for explaining your decision — we completely understand your position and respect it.
In any case, please be assured that we are always happy to help. If you decide to return to this question at any time in the future, we can handle the diagnostics for you quickly and with minimal effort on your side.
If you prefer, you can also perform a short self-check on your own. It takes just a couple of minutes and does not affect real users:
- Activate the plugin and check that the access key is correctly set in the settings.
- Open the website in an incognito/private browser window and submit two test requests:
- one via the contact form
- one test order
(using the email address s@cleantalk.org in both cases)
- Deactivate the plugin again.
- Let us know once the requests are done so we can review them.
There is no urgency — this is simply an option should you ever wish to investigate the issue further.
We appreciate the time you spent with CleanTalk and wish you all the best with your project.
Kind regards,
