Akismet: battling comment spam without captchas
Comment and trackback spam is a pain. A while ago I had a captcha, something not so nice for the visually impaired. Later on I tried a “secret question” plugin. Some people reported that they couldn’t post a comment even if they had the answer right. On top of that, neither of these could do something about trackback spam, so I decided to disable trackbacks for most of my posts. Until now. Akismet is a Wordpress plugin which filters comments and trackbacks using a central blacklist to ensure nothing nasty can get through. Even if spam does get through, I can now mark it as spam so that Akismet can learn from it. I hope it works, we’ll see…
Akismet was originally designed for Wordpress, but as can be seen on their page they encourage people to port the plugin to other blog software as well. If it works I think it’s really great, the only downside is that one needs a Wordpress.com account to be able to use it. And I got mine just today, after a two week wait after subscribing for it…
Despite the wait I think it will do its job very well now that it’s running. Thanks to Ben for letting me know about it ;) .