Blogs and Comment Spam

For as long as I’ve had a blog I’ve fought against the dreaded enemy: Comment Spam.

Luckily Wordpress has come along and now ships standard with a plugin called Akismet (auto kismet), which claims it will eliminate comment spam. The setup process was easy enough; you just need an API key from wordpress.com, enable the plugin and give them the key. From then on, spam comments should be autoflagged, and hopefully eliminated from your posts.

This post will be a testbed for it. If spam DOES get through, the system allows you to flag it, so it can learn what should be considered spam. Hopefully it makes for a more competant and useful blog system… without the hassle of manually going through each and every comment.

If this turns out to be less effective than I’d like, I have looked into implementing further captcha methods.  One such method, a simple plugin for wordpress, forces all comment posters to solve a simple math equation prior to posting their comment.  While this is easily identified and solved by a human, it is far less simple for an automated script to identify the problem and form a solution that is compatible with the comment interface.

An alternate, more prohibitive method is to require all posters to register.  For one thing, as a blog reader, I know that most people will not go through the hassle of registering for everybody’s blog.   And sometimes the most insightful comments will come from those ‘anonymous cowards’ who for whatever reason wish to hide their identity.  So a system that rules out anonymous comments entirely simply is not ideal.

So we shall see how this works.