\jeff{krimmel}

Akismet To The Rescue

I woke up this morning, checked my email, and found 17 spam comments awaiting moderation in my Wordpress queue. Unbelievable. The amount of spam comments on my two blogs (this one and The Bottom Shelf) has increased drastically in the last three weeks.

Until about three weeks ago, about one spam comment per week would find its way into my moderation queue. I am notified by email whenever a comment is awaiting moderation, so it is easy to check it out, identify it as spam, and then delete it. About three weeks ago, I started getting around three spam comments per day. Some days more; other days less. The spikes would be around six spam comments.

The past few days, the spam comments have increased to about six or seven per day. The spikes would get into double digits. I was starting to lose my patience. And then I had seventeen emails waiting in my inbox this morning from all of those spam comments that were made overnight, and I decided enough was enough. I needed to come up with a solution.

Both Greg and Paul had independently suggested Akismet to me for this very purpose. Akismet is basically a filter that identifies spam comments as they arrive so that they don’t even reach my moderation queue. They are held in a special Akismet queue for fifteen days and then deleted, so that I have time to check that queue every now and again and double check that no real comments were flagged as spam.

Here are a couple of important bits of information that I picked up from Akismet’s FAQ:

How does it work?

When a new comment, trackback, or pingback comes to your blog it is submitted to the Akismet web service which runs hundreds of tests on the comment and returns a thumbs up or thumbs down.

Where does the spam go?

When the plugin catches something as spam it saves it in the database for 15 days in case you want to check it out manually and then automattically deletes it. In the unlikely event something gets incorrectly identified as spam you can correct it and it submits the “false positive” back to Akismet for analysis and improvement of our system. If a spam comment happens to get through and you mark it as spam within WordPress, it does the same thing. Akismet becomes more effective the more you use it.

So far Akismet has already captured three spam comments on this blog and seventeen (yes, seventeen!) spam comments on The Bottom Shelf. It’s been running for about five hours or so. All of the comments caught so far are indeed spam. What a wonderful solution. If you’re in a similarly frustrated state, I strongly recommend considering Akismet. I’ve been a customer for less than half a day and am already very satisfied.