Over the weekend I finally got around to installing Akismet on my blog. Akismet is a spam filtering service that works by capturing information about spam caught on all the blogs using it. It them tries to learn from the spam and refine it’s rules to help block future spam.
Spam had been on the rise for me but Movable Type’s anti-spam was doing reasonably fine, until now. In the past I had tightened it so it was a little more ruthless. Sadly, that wasn’t enough anymore.
JD had recommend (and raved about) Akismet to me a while ago. I never looked into that deeply, mainly because I knew Akismet had been developed by the WordPress crew so assumed there wouldn’t be easy integration with MT. I was wrong and I’m a little annoyed at myself that I didn’t install it sooner.
It works brilliantly. My blog has received a few hundred pieces of comment spam since I installed Akismet. So far NONE of them have gone through.
According to Akismet’s “Live Spam Zeitgeist”, 93% of comments are spam. For me that would be closer to 98%. Rather depressing really…
Comments
There is one response to Spam vs ham
Tuesday, 21st November 2006 9:33 am
Ham is much better than spam, plus doesn’t contain any flavour enhancers or preservatives (depending on brands).
Also, i think the Akismet r00z.. I was getting 10′s of spams a day. Now i’m getting 0.0 to 0.01 a month.
It’s fun to install all types of meat catchers!