wordpress vs comment spam : 1-0

Since I switched from Blogger to WordPress I have been getting more comment spam. Blogger used a captcha technique which seemed to be blocking the spam, or maybe just because my blog wasn’t quite that visible to spammers on Blogger. But now that it’s on WordPress things are different.

In fact, I’m guessing that those handy blog-ping update services are used by vile spammers to detect new blogs using blogging software like WordPress that their spamming scripts are written for.

Bastards!
Early this week I was getting hit by another spamming round and I was getting unintended notifications of these crap posts in my GMail because of emails bouncing from the invalid auto-generated emails.

I cleaned up the spam comments asap, cause I hate to see them pollute my blog, but I wanted to find a more permanent solution for the problem.

I didn’t quite think of it but WP already has a plugin ready for spam control called Akismet. I didn’t activate it before because I had to go through the trouble of getting a WordPress API key from the WP site. This time the spammers annoyed me enough to do so.

Posts now get automatically scanned by the Akismet engine, and right now it has trapped 37 comments, all spam, and I didn’t have to do jack for it.

Nice!

So for anyone out there with a WordPress blog and a spam problem. Get that plugin registered and relax. It’s sweet.