John O'Duinn's blog

Comment spam and Akismet

14 Jan 2008

JohnUncategorized 2 Comments

Wherever there are people, you’ll find other people trying to sell them stuff. From overpriced tshirts, bootleg recordings and scalped tickets outside rock concerts, to spam-on-house-phone, spam-on-fax, spam-on-email and now spam-blog-comments.

I was struggling, moderating blog comments the “traditional” way, until Sam Sidler showed me a better way. Since installing Akismet, I can now a) allow real people to add comments, and b) not have to wade through all the spam-comments every day. Very cool. Thanks Sam!

ps: Trivia from Akismet is that  91% of all blog-comments are spam. At what point will spam-blog-comments drown out useful blog-comments, to the point where people start to avoid blogs? Would it ever overrun the medium? Emails are not quite at that stage yet, but house phones all have callerID & answering machines to screen us from spam-phone calls, and fax machines continue to churn out pages of spam-faxes.