As a website owner, one of the most frustrating things is dealing with comment spam. Most of the spam comments are automated, and when you’re dealing with computer / database driven comments, a human will never win that battle.
One of the first WordPress plugins that I install across all of my websites is the Akismet plugin to prevent comment spam. The reason I use it is because it works almost flawlessly. Only periodically do I receive a comment that should have been marked as spam, and it’s a real time saver.
As you can see from the screenshot above, this morning, I passed half a million spam comments that were blocked by Akismet. Without this free comment spam plugin, I would have had to spend hours deleting comments, and I likely would miss real comments because of the amount that has been blocked.
Here’s a shout out to Akismet, one of the few plugins I have no reservations about using or recommending.
How does Akismet make money doing this? You don’t pay them. My only conclusion is they get into your computer as spyware to observe visitor behavior to sell??? Maybe I’m wrong, but I vote for the iron-clad never lift a finger to program or protect blogger platform.
Talking about spam… I don’t mean to be rude but come on Mr. Frager: you could’ve just typed in akismet.com into your browser’s address bar and find out for yourself. Turns out that their money-making scheme is pretty old and widely used: They sell their product to those willing to pay for it.
Owen:, they have different pricing structures for different uses.
You continue with your spyware complot theory ???
You’d be surprised how much spam slips through Akismet. I use this one: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/spam-free-wordpress/
Its also a good idea to set up your wordpress to stop accepting comments after 14 days, limit posts that have more than one link
You fight spams with spams!!
It’s certainly a great plug in.
I run a forum though and would love to get something similar there. However, due to the nature of forums I guess it would be near on impossible to design one that is as effective.
Still props to Askimet for preventing my WP blog from getting spammed up!