Comment spam improvements
When I jumped up to WordPress 2.1.2, I also turned on Akismet, a plug-in that filters blog spam. If you’ve never run a blog, you probably can’t believe the volume of crap that gets autoposted to even the most backwater and benign of blogs. When I logged in after 3-4 days of not touching this blog, there were more than 600 comments all spam. At least I was forced to believe they were all spam; love comments though I do, I’m not reading 600 ads for unsavory, illegal “products” thinly disguised as comments to find the one comment that might be out there.
The 600+ set was a pretty big wakeup call. I think my blog has passed some threshold or some new set of comment spammers have appeared and there’s been a sudden jump in comment spam. At any rate, I was finally sick enough of it to get an application key and start using Akismet.
So far – after a few hours – things look pretty good. If you’ve been trying to comment and not seeing your posts show up, now’s a fine time to try again, as I’ll probably see them. If you do post a comment that doesn’t appear, send me a note.
I started Akismet up a couple hours before this post. When I made the post, Akismet had blocked 10 bad comments. You can see the current total near the bottom of most pages.