Firetop

The more frequent visitor to this blog will have noticed the distinct lack of postings made during the latter part of last week. Other than being incredibly busy, this was due in part to the fifty or so attempted spam comments made each day from somebody keen to drive my visitors to numerous sex related websites. I got pretty annoyed by this and on Friday night, before heading off to Cardiff, accidently deleted an entire post whilst moderating some spam links (that’s rushing for you). I then had to wait for one of my freelance contacts to restore the comment that I had deleted. I’ve found a good plug-in for Wordpress which addresses the spam attack issue, it’s called Akismet (Automattic Kismet).

After installing the plug-in, each time a new comment is made to a posting it is submitted to the Akismet web service which checks the comment for validity. If the comment contains too many hyperlinks, spam terms (especially X-rated) or is from a known spam IP address it gets placed into the spam folder in the Wordpress admin area. This saves an enormous amount of time and cuts out the moderation announcements I receive to my in-box. Now all I have to do is overview the comments identified as spam once per day and I can delete them in bulk (or restore them to genuine comment status). This means I can spend more time blogging and less time moderating junk.

Bookmark to: