By BURKE
Open Up a Can of Blog Spam Repellent
Remember when blogs didn’t have spam? No more. Now bloggers can spend as much time deleting spam as they do creating content.
That’s where http://www.akismet.com comes in.
First, you download the Akismet API.
Then, according to the site, here’s what happens next: When a new comment, trackback, or pingback comes to your blog, it’s submitted to the Akismet web service. Akismet runs hundreds of tests on the comment and returns a thumbs up or thumbs down.
This means no more need to maintain a blacklist, because you’re always protected up-to-the-second from the latest dirty tricks of spammers.
And there’s no maintenance, no upgrading, and no hassle.
When the plugin catches something as spam, it saves it in the database for 15 days in case you want to check it out manually. After 15 days it’s deleted.
And Akismet gets smarter with time.
If you find something was incorrectly identified as spam, you can correct it. Akismet uses these “false positives” to refine its system. If a spam comment happens to get through and you mark it as spam within WordPress, it does the same thing.
Do I hear bloggers breathing a collective sigh of relief?
One last thing… Akismet is free for personal use. If you make more than $500 per month with your blog, they ask that you pay $5 per month.
Well worth the money, I’d say.
