On Wordpress, Akismet, and Spam
Being new to the blogosphere and having taken various recommendations to go with Wordpress (which I must say I am very happy with), I was not initially concerned about spam.
Following the recent receipt of two spam comments, I decided to enable Akismet. In the last two days things have gone wild! Akismet has captured nearly 200 spam comments across the two blogs that I run.
Whilst I am delighted that Akismet has intervened, I am nervous about enabling people to leave comments without moderation. I have never refused to allow a genuine comment, positive or negative but I am trying to balance the benefits of allowing un-moderated comments versus the risk of getting spammed to death for those that get through the Akismet filter. Any more experienced bloggers out there with any advice?
April 12th, 2007 at 1:10 pm
I can’t think of too many advantages of allowing unmoderated comments, compared to the benefits of screening, so I would definitely lean towards screening.
You’re missing an in-between solution though, which is allowing unmoderated comments as long as they’re not anonymous. Something like OpenID allows a reasonable degree of interoperability for people to identify themselves when commenting, and it looks like you can set this up with Wordpress fairly easily. I googled this, for example: http://verselogic.net/projects/wordpress/wordpress-openid-plugin/
April 17th, 2007 at 8:16 am
Thanks Ciaran. I think I’ll leave moderation on for a while until I get a chance to take a look at OpenID at least.
Strangely since the spam attack last weekend – the amount of spam has completely dried up and I only get a small handful of spam posts (all caught by Akismet) a day now.