I don’t know if I like to whinge, or just like to whinge about whingers, but here I go anyway.
Most Wordpress bloggers will be familiar with Akismet, a plugin that helps control comment spam.
Like anything it is not 100 per cent fool proof, but overall I think it does a pretty good job of quarantining comment spam.
For those unfamiliar with the process, Akismet will “sideline” suspect comments and hold them aside for about two weeks. After this time they are automatically deleted.
WP bloggers are able to review these comments at any time during the hold over period, and either delete them immediately, or mark any that may have been tagged spam inadvertently, as “not spam”.
Through the actions of WP users either marking comments as spam, or “not spam”, the Akismet system is constantly updating itself, or “learning”.
As I said, it’s not perfect, and it makes a few mistakes from time to time, but now that I’m using it, I’d hate to be living in a world without Akismet.
Not everyone is so convinced however. I was reading through some forums the other day and one blogger in particular was very critical of Akismet. “It’s crap. It’s useless. It lets through the spam, while blocking genuine comments!”
I don’t know, there’s just no pleasing some people is there? It’s not as if we, the end users, are paying for the service, and being “ripped off” accordingly, each time Akismet “stuffs up”.
People need to remember Akismet is a tool to assist in combating comment spam, not a complete solution to the problem.
The “complete solution” to the problem is the complete elimination of comment spam. I wonder how we bring that about then?
I do have one slight whinge with Akismet though (I had to complain about something here…), and that is the requirement to create a wordpress.com blog, so a “WordPress.com API key” can be generated, which is needed to enable the Akismet plugin.
That’s fine if you’re not “self hosting” your blog, but surely a waste of time for those who are. Is there not another way to do this?
You can have an account-only (no blog) account
Yeah, but really I regard disassociated.com as my WP “account”… I mean if you’re installing and setting up WP on a webserver, you should get an API key as part of that process.
Akismet is pretty good at its job. I have yet to hear anything bad about it from other bloggers I know personally. Haven’t read much about it on forums. It does manage to keep most spam at bay.
The only concern that I have with Askimet is that auto delete thing. My ticker on how many spam comments it has filtered for me keeps going up every time I log in, but when I click on “spam comments” it tells me I have none in my queue. Which makes me wonder if the count is wrong or my spam is going somewhere into the ether.
I don’t care as long as it’s actually spam, but I have had legitimate comments get put there. So I keep checking and keep worrying about where those spam comments are that askimet says it blocked, but aren’t showing up in my queue.
Just the same, I would rather lose one legitimate comment, than have all that garbage show up in my blog comments. So for free–what’s to complain about?
Interesting problem there Mrs Flipphead… comments are kept, or meant to be kept, for 15 days before they auto delete. Are you running an older version of Akismet maybe? I have 2.0.2… maybe if you have an earlier version there may be a bug in it, that’s deleting comments before the 15 day holding time is up?