So I was getting deluged with spam. Yeah, tons of it. I mean, I had over 20,000 spam comment entries in the past month. Jeez. So I decided to do something about it. Spam Karma is really a nice plugin and does stop the comments from displaying all the spam, but it STILL let the spam in and took up space in my database while it was stored for processing. That’s over 20,000 entries that simply got deleted later. Wow. So, I went and installed Akismet; well, to be more precise I activated the Akismet plugin in WordPress. Akismet is included in the standard download of WordPress, so all I had to do was activate it. I followed the simple instructions there and now I’ve got it up and working.
It’s only been up for about two hours and it’s already blocked 23 spams. I know for you 1337s out there, that 23 spams in two hours is a drop in the bucket. But I’ve had to deal with them in the past. Now that I’ve got Akismet installed, the stuff is handled automatically! I also installed the Akismet Count plugin so I can see (and marvel at) how much spam has been blocked by Akismet.
I just activated it a couple of weeks ago and it’s wonderful. The spam is just blocked.
It does catch more than spam occasionally, so I always look before clearing out the akismet box, but all in all a small miracle.
Well, thank goodness, we haven’t had a big problem with spam at our website (where we host our blogs). My husband does all the geeky stuff, so I have no idea what he’s running for spam. I just looked at the Akismet plug-in, and like most every cool plug-in for Wordpress, it requires a newer version than what I’m running. Sigh. Now that it’s football season, I see almost zero chance of getting the hubby to help me upgrade!
Love all the geeky tips Bill!