Akismet, how I love thee

Tuesday, May 9th, 2006

Back in December of ‘05 Molly wrote Best. Spam. Ever. at which time I was lucky enough not to have the problem of comment spam. Fast forward to about a month ago and suddenly my post Proper URI design started to gain the attention not of fellow web-heads, but of spammer-freaks. Who knows, it could have been my immensely popular post on Coming soon to a theatre near you (I confess, I dugg my own post) that opened me up to the non-web-head crowd. Either way, the comment spam began to flow.

About a week of moderating later it started to get annoying. That’s when I decided to give Akismet a try. O’ the spam free bliss. Since I activated it, Akismet’s caught 112 of the annoying bits of comment excrement. I don’t even notice it until I log into WordPress and see the little number in the Akismet tab telling me that there’s junk waiting to be deleted.

Screenshot of Akismet at work

Out of the 112 it’s caught so far, only 1 has slipped through the net. I’d say that’s a pretty good margin of error wouldn’t you? Captchas shmaptchas, I’m sold on Akismet and if you suffer from comment spam, I suggest you take a look at it too.

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4 Comments

Sarven Capadisli says:
May 9th, 2006 at 1:20 pm
To differentiate humans from spammers, I pose the following question to my readers in my article comments:

What is the meaning of life? (provide a complete and sound proof in the allotted space below).

Works wonders! :)
Ara says:
May 9th, 2006 at 2:39 pm
Sarven: I’d love to see the AI behind that! Most people go with “what colour is an orange?” or “what’s my first name?”.
Ian Muir says:
May 9th, 2006 at 5:01 pm
I’m a big fan of Akismet as well. It’s actually a bit of an ego boost that my blog is apparently worth spamming to somebody.

As far as the prove your human thing, I’m a big fan of http://www.kittenauth.com/

It seems silly at first but I think something like this could actually be quite effective.
Ara says:
May 9th, 2006 at 7:22 pm
Ian: Though the kitten thing could be effective, unless your site’s all about cute furry animals I fear it will cramp your style just a little. ;-)

Number of spam caught now stands at 124!