Use WordPress? Get Akismet
Since the explosion in the world of blogging over the last few years one of the biggest problems has become comment spam. This is when somebody automatically (or perhaps even by hand) adds some lame comment to your blog which is actually promoting their website. A good proportion (at least in my experience) is promoting online prescription drugs. The kind that we all used to get emails about before the days of Gmail.
Many things have been tried such as Google’s support of the tag and the use of a CAPTCHA to prove you are human.
A few months back I installed Akismet. It is a product from WordPress themselves and you require an API key from them to enable it on your blog but it is such an amazing tool. Because it interfaces with the Akismet website it is constantly updated and you don’t need to update spam “definitions” like you would do with a virus checker or other such application.
Any spam it blocks is sent back to the Aksimet database to enable it to learn and update itself to help others. You don’t need to maintain your own “blacklist” of spammers and in my experience it is very, very effective. You can pick out false positives or any missed spam and this gets reported back to Akismet so it can be updated and improved. According to the website “Akismet becomes more effective the more you use it.”
According to Akismet 4,853 comments have been detected as spam on this blog alone. You can also see how Akismet is performing world wide. From their website:
1,781,113,909 spams caught so far
2,964,756 so far today
95% of all comments are spam
So if you are suffering from the problem of blog spam and you use WordPress then give it a try.