Saw my first spam comment on the blog today. A “you post they host” comment held for moderation because of my settings. I noticed the intall of akismet about a week ago; guess it’s time to get another wordpress.com api key so I can better control spam on this blog.
One spam comment can be swatted like a fly. But perhaps one is a harbinger of things to come. Just another thing to include in the list of stuff to help students deal with in a blog/portfolio platform, if it’s to be open.
Marcos: you can get your Akismet number here. That’s a personal license; a sitewide licenses cost $…. though B@B was able to get a free license in exchange for placing “Protected by Akismet | Blog with WordPress” in all our footers…
Our sitewide stats pluging (which tracks Updated Blogs, New Posts, and Comments) doesn’t differentiate between spam and real comments… we’ve had 4500 or so comments in the past month, and about 2000 posts… early on, those numbers were in alignment, so I’m assuming the number of spam comments is roughly equal to the difference between the two numbers, give or take a few hundred.
Few spam comments ever get through our Akismet.
I’m not that bothered by spam, when it’s mostly controlled. As Matt indicates, the AC has some good spam blocking already installed. Akismet isn’t that tough to implement, and I’m not at all annoyed by it. I just haven’t taken the time to get the key and activate. That’s my issue. If there can be a site-wide Akismet key, as Matt suggests might be possible, this would be awesome from an institutional perspective. While I’m not annoyed about needing to add some spam protection, there are some (Marcos, for example) who might find it annoying and even confusing. Most folks probably don’t want to be bothered with this stuff, even though they definitely don’t want spam.
I keep having the Akismet request for the API key every time I log on into the dashboard. It says:
“Akismet is almost ready. You must enter your WordPress.com API key for it to work.”
Can you say which things are annoying about Akismet? I haven’t worked on it yet, but it’s on my list for the summer to do a UI review and give the developer my recommendations. Any feedback you have on it (specifically, the ways it’s annoying) would be useful.
Even though it’s no longer supported, I’m still running SpamKarma for our eportfolios. I’ve always found to be more effective and less annoying than Akismet. It really does stop all spam commenting completely. So far, it’s only been foiled in cases where students have actively deactivated it. When the time comes that it stops working, when an upgrade breaks it (as is probably inevitable with no-longer-supported plugins), I’ll be looking for something else. Akismet, no doubt.
Right now, as you note, we’re running a few plugins sitewide — including WP-SpamFree, which commenters see only when they’re not logged into the site — and Askimet. I’ve applied for a sitewide license for Askimet so that individual users won’t have to enter their own API codes, but I haven’t heard back from WordPress about this yet.
I think it’s important to note that WordPress has many different options that users can use to guard against spam. But if people want to encourage comments, they have to accept the fact spam is, unfortunately, one of the risks to putting open content on the web. But I think that with WP-SpamFree and Askimet (if we can get it going site-wide), most users won’t have to worry about it too much.