Akismet - I think I love you!
March 19, 2007 | Comments (7) | Filed under: Blogging
Just in case you haven’t been watching our spam blocked widget at the bottom of our black side bar, during the last few days our total number of spam blocked has been jumping up by leaps and bounds. The plugin responsible for this is known as Akismet, and was mentioned as one of our top 15 wordpress plugins. Akismet now comes pre-installed with new downloads of Wordpress, which could not be better news for anyone running a blog.
Akismet basically works like this, when a new comment or ping is submitted to your blog via your comment fields or by trackback, it is sent to the Akismet severs to be tested. If the comment is determined to be spam, it is dumped into a spam queue on your site. If the comment is questionable, it is queued for moderation. If it passes all the tests, it gets posted on your site. The beauty of the entire system is you benefit from the knowledge of all other blogs using Akismet, and your spam fighting tools are up to date at all times.
About a year ago I setup a blog / community site for a friend of mine using Drupal for the backend. Within a month of his site being up, he had over 5,000 spam comments posted to his site, and the number of incoming spam was even effecting the performance of his site. We eventually just decided to turn off commenting anyway, since he didn’t really want it in the first place, but it really makes you appreciate just how amazing a tool like Akismet is to have at your disposal with Wordpress. As it turns out, since then the Drupal community has learned about the power of Akismet as well, and now has a plugin available for their latest release.
If you’re running a site with any type of open commenting system, I couldn’t recommend Akismet more. These days, spam is so prevalent that you are just setting yourself up for disaster without using some kind of spam filter. If you need proof of Akismet’s value, TechCrunch just recently passed the 2 million spam blocked mark. Now THAT is a lot of spam. We’ve just barely passed the 300 mark!
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I think the number of spams blocked is going to become a symbol of a blog’s popularity, alongside visitors and RSS subscribers
I’ve been using Akismet on Drupal for the past month, and it’s a godsend. Before I used captchas to keep the spam bots out, and it worked pretty well, but it’s a hassle for real commenters.
That is good news. I love Drupal as a platform, but the few sites I’ve setup using it were in the same boat as yours. Either kill comments or burden the users…