I hate spam.
Email spam is under control thanks to SpamAssassin, but comment and trackback spam was a big problem. Wordpress antispam measures are useless. Every day I had to remove between 5 and dozens of spam-comments. I could have used a captcha or even worst, a moderation queue before a comment is displayed, but there are some issues with these approaches:
- They are rude, like having a “you are not welcome here” sign.
- They discourage participation
- They don’t stop trackback spam, and in wordpress, trackbacks look like regular comments
But the biggest problem for me is, of course, all the time I waste babysitting everything. A moderation queue would take me even more time. That’s unacceptable.
Looking for some solution that keeps blog spammers at bay without human intervention (MY human intervention), I discovered Akismet, a wonderful thing that works like many solutions in the email antispam world: a colaborative database of spam. Quoting from their 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.
That’s wonderful. For those of you without server admin experience, this is also the (IMHO) best approach to stop email spam.
And now the best part:
Do I have to maintain a blacklist? Nope! Part of the idea of Akismet is that you’re always protected up-to-the-second from the latest dirty tricks of spammers. There’s no maintenance, no upgrading, no hassle.
Ahh, no more messing with wordpress’ silly internal blacklists.
And the best of all is, every akismet user contributes back to the system. For instance, if a spam comment can make it and gets approved (something very rare), I will quickly mark it as spam. That will feed Akismet’s central database and every user of the system will benefit.
Let’s see some stats now, Akismet is telling me this:
Akismet has caught 59,503 spam for you since you installed it.
That’s a hell of a lot of spam. I have been using Akismet for like three months. It has caught more than 660 spam comments every day. And in all this time only 5 or 6 spam comments made it to the blog, I quickly marked them as spam. Akismet alone saved me HOURS of blog babysitting and spam removing. I love it.
