Akismet Spam Catcher
I gave Askismet two weeks. Verdict: I love it.
Let me give you a little background: There are hundreds of pieces of spam that spammers think ought to be displayed prominently on Chasing the Wind. From weight loss drugs to pornography to cheap mortgages, the spammers have setup software “robots” to spam thousands of blogs.
The previous method I used to stop the spammers was blacklisting them, and it was manually intensive. Let’s say it was some site like http://www.something.com . (Don’t worry, that site is safe.) I have all first time comments from people moderated and I’d see this spam, then I’d add their website to a blacklist that would delete any post that contained “something.com.” Effective but time consuming. And man, you should see the list of horrible, perverted things they want to post.
I first heard about Akismet from Doug at Coffeeswirls, and when it was released I gave it a shot. After a week, I took a deep breath, and deleted that blacklist. And after another week, still no spam has gotten through. Akismet catches it all. The Akismet home page says that as of this morning, they’ve caught 260,522 spam attempts (6382 so far today), and that 81% of all comments are spam.
Now if they’d only come out with an email product, too…
I’m glad something I said helped someone out there!
You know, it was such a success for me as well that I started to think about e-mail as well. Akismet takes spam largely out of the blogging equation. I love it.
Doug
November 17, 2005