Activating Akismet
Yesterday was a comment spam watershed for me. Overnight I received hundreds of new comment spams, despite the captcha I had implemented a week ago. While speaking at the OCRI partnership series yesterday morning, hundreds more were posted. Somehow the spammers have defeated it.Â
I got back to my office at about 2 in the afternoon yesterday, and activated Akismet, which is the new Wordpress comment spam filter that’s in Wordpress 2.0. In order to do so, I had to go get a Wordpress.com account, and API key, which took a few minutes, but after that it’s been clear sailing. Since late yesterday afternoon, Akismet has trapped 435 new spam comments.Â
The best thing about Akismet? It traps the comment spam without making legitimate commenters jump through hoops. Kudos to Matt and his team.
May 19th, 2006 at 9:48 am
I’ve never used Askimet myself. I’ve used Spam Karma 2.0 for a long time now. Hope Askimet solves that problem. Comment spam is such a pain to deal with. If they find another way around, Spam Karma seems to let about 1 in 500 through, but does a real good job.
May 19th, 2006 at 10:24 am
I’ve never tried Spam Karma, Ken. But so far, Akismet looks good.
May 19th, 2006 at 5:42 pm
[...] It sounds like Alec Saunders is experiencing the same Akismet ecstasy that I am. Chris Pirillo, though, not quite as excited. Chris reports massive false positives. What could be up with that? I haven’t had one false positive in hundreds of spomments caught. There aren’t any configuration parameters, so it would be hard for it to be something Chris did in setting it up. I don’t know how Akismet works, but perhaps there is some text being analyzed from Chris’ site that is always considered spammish? Or maybe it was a momentary failure of the Akismet service? Any other ideas? [...]