WordPress And Akismet
Anybody who uses WordPress probably uses Akismet. Not only does it come with WordPress out of the box but if you don’t use it you’re buried in spam. Every time I update my blog I check the spam to at least scan it to make sure there are no false positives. I rarely find any.
What about when you get comments in your approval queue that are comments that add nothing to your blog nor show the commenter(human or machine)has ever seen your blog? Akismet hasn’t flagged them as spam but when you click on the link it goes to a piece of crap site with spun articles as content.
Do you just trash them or mark them as spam?
Helping Others Down Stream
In my view, anybody that auto-submits comments to any site should be flagged as spam and I take the responsibility seriously. I really want Akismet to learn from my experience so that other bloggers won’t even have to see these crap comments. We all need as much time as we can get to create quality content for our sites. We don’t need to be human spam editors. Anything I can do to get the spam where it belongs, I’ll do it.
The same goes for getting legitimate comments out of spam. If I see any in the spam folder by mistake, I make sure to mark them Not Spam so Akismet can learn from its mistake. Of course, this doesn’t happen very often.
Do you take an active role in spam reduction? Post a comment and let me know where you stand.
I don’t use Akismet because it costs money. I don’t get quite that much spam so I usually just edit each comment and take out the link unless it’s really bad like xlxwmsmxcasp which I don’t even understand what they’re trying to do.
Of course my blog isn’t popular so I don’t get many comments. I imagine with yours, Akismet is very valuable.
You shouldn’t have to pay for Akismet. Their rules are if you’re making $500/month or more from the site (not just your business) they want you to pay. I would go download it, get a non-commercial key and save yourself some time. They’re really talking more about ecommerce sites that process transactions, etc.
Also, if you get it you can stop messing around with comments and NOT give those crap sites any links back. The shskdfhska links usually come from robot generated gmail accounts. All the spammer is trying to do is steal a link from your site because they’re not moderated BEFORE the link happens.
Thanks for stopping by. That’s my two cents worth. I work hard to build legitimate backlinks to my site and won’t give a spammer even a crappy non-seo’d link back to their site if I can avoid it. Akismet has stopped thousands of these.