Akismet Catches Comment Spam Well But You Might Need to Check
Just as email spam is a scourge of email and a serious hindrance to clear communication via email, comment spam is a scourge of blogging. Businesses getting into blogging need to have some confidence that their site will not be polluted by this comment spam garbage.
A standard plugin for WordPress, the Automattic Kismet, or Akismet tool seems to me to operate very effectively as a spam catcher. I’ve been quite impressed, with this and otherr WordPress blogs of mine, that the various spam messages don’t seem to be getting through. And I have been quite pleased to hit the ‘delete all’ link to get rid of the spam items trapped by Akismet.
The Akismet site describes the product rather romantically:
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.
I don’t know about “restoring innocence to blogging” but in the past few days I’ve realised I might have been somewhat innocent in trusting Akismet too readily, not so much in terms of blocking spam, but in terms of whether it might also be blocking legitimate, totally non-spamming comments. This is the issue of Akismet false positives.
I’ve just spent some twenty minutes or so going through the 371 comment items for this blog, as trapped by Akismet and being held for me to either clear or delets. Of the 371, one was a legitimate comment, which I cleared for publication.
Previously I had been looking at a sea of the usual spamming rubbish and hitting “delete all”. Now I will be taking the time to check, so that I don’t thoughtlessly delete legitimate comments.
Tags: Akismet, comment-spamRelated Stories
POSTED IN: General, Resources, Risk Management
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