Stopping Spam
It’s the bane of the internet, but what can you do? Spam stinks.
For example: I had blacklisted hotmail.com addresses, until a kindly reader pointed out that his posts weren’t getting through. (Sorry again, Juan.) So I unblocked hotmail.com, as I know lots of people use it as a spam capture address. Guess what? Within 15 minutes, a half dozen spams from hotmail.com had made it into various comments threads.
Next, I went to the WordPress plug-in page and installed something called Akismet, which has come highly recommended numerous times. TechCrunch reports that it’s stopped a million spams from their blog. The second after I installed it, Akismet reported stopping 14,000 spams. I’m guessing WordPress keeps a spam database of the ones it’s blacklisted, and those were amongst the 14,000. (I learned a long time ago NOT to tag spam comments as spam, but rather to delete them. No use filling up my database with crap e-mail.)
In any case, let me know if you have any problems posting, or if anything looks weird to you on the site in the next few days. This site has been spammed like you wouldn’t believe since the new year, and an alarming number have made it through WordPress’ basic spam filters. I’m hoping this will stop that and make my job a little easier.
Related from the V&S Archives:
January 12th, 2007 at 11:19 am
Akismet was included in the Yahoo WordPress install when I set up hosting last year. I have no spam problems, but then I have no commenters, either, so there you go.