Scrubwell – Hides Emails & Phone Numbers in Comments

Description

Visitors paste private details into comment boxes all the time: their own phone number, a customer’s email, worse. Once it’s saved, it’s in your database, your backups and your search results, and it’s your problem.

Scrubwell removes that information before it is saved.

  • Two layers. Visitors see [REDACTED PHONE] appear as they type, so they know what happened. Your server removes it again when the comment arrives, so bots and visitors with JavaScript turned off are covered too.
  • Leaves the right fields alone. The comment form’s own Name, Email and Website fields are never touched.
  • No outside service. Everything runs on your site and in the visitor’s browser. Nothing is sent anywhere.
  • Counts what it catches. See how many items were removed under Settings Scrubwell.

Free version removes:

  • Email addresses
  • US and Canadian phone numbers

Scrubwell Pro

Pro adds credit and debit card numbers (checked with the card-number checksum, so order numbers aren’t caught), Social Security numbers, bank routing and account numbers, and US street addresses. It also adds a «Send anyway» button for the types you allow (with a log), a «never remove» list, a per-post off switch, a choice of roles to skip, and protection for Contact Form 7 messages, bbPress and BuddyPress posts and private messages, and WooCommerce order notes.

Installation

  1. Upload the plugin and activate it.
  2. Go to Settings Scrubwell to choose what to remove.

FAQ

Will it remove the email a commenter types into the Email field?

No. Only the comment text is filtered.

Are administrators filtered?

Not by default. Turn off «Don’t filter site administrators» if you want them filtered too.

Can I turn it off for one field?

Adding data-scrubwell="off" to a field (or a wrapper around it) turns off the as-you-type removal in the browser for that field. The server still removes private info when the text arrives, because it can’t trust markup sent by a visitor’s browser.

To turn off the server side too, use the scrubwell_skip filter in a small plugin or your theme’s functions.php. For example, to skip comments on one post:

add_filter( 'scrubwell_skip', function ( $skip, $context ) { return $skip || 42 === $context['post_id']; }, 10, 2 );

Can I keep my own phone number or email domain?

Yes, with the scrubwell_allowlist filter. Return a list of values to keep, such as (214) 555-0100 or @example.com (every address at that domain). Scrubwell Pro adds a settings box for this.

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Contributors & Developers

“Scrubwell – Hides Emails & Phone Numbers in Comments” is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.

Contributors

Changelog

1.1.0

  • New: scrubwell_skip, scrubwell_allowlist, scrubwell_hits and scrubwell_exempt_user filters and the scrubwell_redacted action, for developers and Scrubwell Pro.
  • Fixed: the FAQ now explains that data-scrubwell="off" only affects the browser layer.
  • New: «Upgrade to Pro» link on the settings page.

1.0.0

  • First release.