Last Blogger

Akismet is a plugin for Wordpress designed to combat spam. After reading a post over at Lorelle’s blog about a successful fight against spam, I decided to at least begin my fight with akismet.

As of late I’ve been getting a lot of spam. It never made it to my website because I moderate comments. But that means a lot of e-mail for me (one for each spam post) and some undue lag for visitors. I wasn’t happy with either situation, but apathy got the best of me. But using Lorelle’s post as motivation, I set up akismet today. I needed to get a wordpress account in order to activate the plugin. The good news is that I could just set up a username account only rather than a full blown blog. The downside is that it’s yet another account… I’ve been racking up accounts of all sorts as of late.

I’ve only been running it for about 12 hours so far, but it’s 5/5 and a real comment made its way through unscathed by the wrath of false-positives. The great thing about it identifying spam is that I don’t get e-mails about the spam so that should clear up my mailbox. So far so good. I’m somewhat optimistic that this is all I’ll need as the spam that I get is pretty robotic and repetitive. Picking it out isn’t that hard at all. If it continues to do well over the next few days, I’ll remove the need for administrator approval to post a comment.

If you’re using Worpress and haven’t yet done anything to stem the tide of comment spam, Try out Akismet. It takes 3 minutes to set up and is really easy to turn off if you don’t like it for any reason. From what I can see so far, you’ll be really happy that you did it.