Blogging can indeed be a nightmare, without the right tools. Why? Spam.
Yes indeed – Spammers and their spambots, can make life a living hell for any popular blog. The aim is usually to gain links to their websites. Thus, they post irrelevant content in the comment section of a blog, with links to their website. Some are even more sophisticated and make use of “spambots” (an acronym of spam+robots) to automatically enter such useless comments.
Almost a year ago, I asked: “What is it about my blog?”
What is it about my blog that makes me have to delete so many junk comments? As a matter of fact, I just marked 198 comments as SPAM and had them deleted immediately. Just as they were deleted, another 2 were waiting. I promptly deleted them too.
If you blog, and use WordPress, and have not installed any form of plug-in to control spam, you should consider the highly popular Akismet WordPress-plugin.
According to their website:
Automattic Kismet (Akismet for short) is a collaborative effort to make comment and trackback spam a non-issue and restore innocence to blogging, so you never have to worry about spam again.
This is how Akismet works. When a new comment, trackback, or pingback comes to your blog, it is submitted to the Akismet web service which runs hundreds of tests on the comment and classifies it into Awaiting Moderation, or spam. If the comment ends up in the Awaiting Moderation section, you can later approve it. The downside is that you might still have to scan through the Spam section, to be sure legitimate comments/trackbacks are not lost with the other gabbage.
Another WordPress plug-in that can be nicely combined with Akismet, is WP-Gatekeeper.
This plugin contains all the routines needed to display, check, and manage challenges for the Gatekeeper anti-spam system. The point of Gatekeeper is to stymie spambots by requiring a commenter to answer a question that has an obvious answer. Challenges are not posed to users who are logged in.
Essentially, WP-Gateway keeps the spambots away and Akismet handles the spam comments entered by humans. This combo is now working well for me, and I can spend useful time on my other endeavours.
What are your experiences, please share your thoughts.
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