My WordPress Spam Troubles Are Over!
About a week ago someone had posted a comment on my blog in reply to my “Is Ubuntu Family Friendly” post, and by accident I marked it as spam. This is common for people like me who have installed the WordPress software on their servers, but never have actually signed up for an account with WordPress or installed any third-party spam management plugins. People like that (like me) would end up getting anywhere from 15 to 40 of the most absurd spam comments posted to their blog for review on a daily basis. Because you actually want genuine comments to appear on your website, you sit down and go through all the comments and end up getting into that habit where you hover your mouse over the same part of the screen and then repeatedly click over and over without moving anywhere else. Do it too quickly, and you’ll end up clicking “Spam” on stuff you don’t want to mark as spam.
While googling for a solution to recovery the comment I accidentally tossed into my WordPress database purgatory, I found a cool spam management plugin called Akismet. You can download it from www.akismet.com. This little thing has a lot of really cool features, including pie-charts and line-graphs showing statistics about the daily spam and “ham” (real comments) submitted to your blog. And for once, I almost never ever see 40+ spam messages a day waiting to be trashed. Not to mention the fact that you can very easily recover comments you didn’t mean to mark as spam in the first place. If you’re a user of WordPress, I highly recommend this little plugin. The only slight drawback is that you have to sign up for a free account with WordPress.com, but that only takes a few minutes and I’d bet that most of you out there have already done this. Blog on!
December 2nd, 2008 at 12:15 am
Akismet is fantastic! I’ve been using it for quite a while now, probably the single most valuable feature is the “delete all”. It’s pretty good at catching real spam, and somehow, real, valuable comments always make it to the top of the pile to be approved.
The other thing I can suggest (and I’m going to give it a spin as soon as I get a chance) is reCaptcha. I think it’d take care of every last bit of bot spam, and Akismet can clean up the rest…. would be a perfect combo in my opinion.