The beauty of Akismet.

Man, I can’t believe I didn’t catch on to this sooner. This blog tends to get hit hard by spam…it started off slow, maybe one or two messages a day, and then it ramped up to around 15+. The good and bad thing about that is that I can halt comments from being posted until after I’ve reviewed them. This is great because anyone who reads anything here doesn’t have to look at Viagra ads, but bad because the process of marking a comment as spam and then banning the IP address that posted it is long and arduous. It got so bad that I eventually had to set up a different folder in my email client that I automatically forwarded all messages from my blog into, otherwise my mail was 75% comment spam.

It got to a point where I was fed up and started to look for a good spam plugin for WordPress. Of course like any internet user these days I just googled “WordPress spam plugin” and the third result was on the WordPress Codex written by the WordPress crew themselves. They enlightened me to a little plugin that is installed by default with most WordPress installations called Akismet, and said that it would more than likely dodge most comment spam. I went ahead and activated Akismet (for WordPress users, it’s as easy as logging into WordPress and then going to the plugin tab) and since then I haven’t seen a single piece of comment spam.

I’m pretty excited about this. I’d say at least half of my interaction with the blog was getting rid of comment spam as opposed to writing posts so this will be a time saver. My only problem is that I tend not to get a whole lot of comments of the genuine nature so I’m not sure if Akismet is just going crazy blocking everyone’s comments or if it really is doing its job. If someone (or multiple someones) could do me a favor and leave a comment I’d really appreciate it! Help put my mind at ease. =)

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