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
- Upload the plugin and activate it.
- Go to Settings Scrubwell to choose what to remove.
FAQ
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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_skipfilter 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_allowlistfilter. Return a list of values to keep, such as(214) 555-0100or@example.com(every address at that domain). Scrubwell Pro adds a settings box for this.
Reviews
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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.
ContributorsTranslate “Scrubwell – Hides Emails & Phone Numbers in Comments” into your language.
Interested in development?
Browse the code, check out the SVN repository, or subscribe to the development log by RSS.
Changelog
1.1.0
- New:
scrubwell_skip,scrubwell_allowlist,scrubwell_hitsandscrubwell_exempt_userfilters and thescrubwell_redactedaction, 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.
