Behind The Blog

Blog comment spammers are truly the scourge of the blogging world. The fact that probably over 90% of the comments we get on this blog site are pure spam is truly annoying. The stats from Akismet, including the “zeitgeist” I’ve shown on the right are rather discouraging (and unfortunately I’d love to say that the stats are inflated because Akismet is a product to protect against blog spam – but unfortunately those numbers are supported by my own experience across many blogging sites). Blog comment spam is a true example of people believing that “the ends justify the means“. In order to get better SEO for their clients, spammers will pollute the zillions of blogs out there written by well-meaning people who just want to write and really don’t want to deal with some of the rather heinous and vile comments that spammers leave. Personally I can’t understand how a blog comment spammer can look at themselves in the mirror and be okay with what they are doing… but hey, there are a lot of jobs/people/services out there that I also wonder about.

In any event today I finally made a switch I’d been wanting to do for several months… I moved this site over to Akismet for blog comment spam protection.

From the beginning of this blog site, I was using Spam Karma 2 for a number of reasons and it seemed to work fine. Then back in July, the SK2 developer, Dave du Verle, announced that he was officially discontinuing development of Spam Karma 2, was releasing it under the GPL version 2 and making the code available for others from a new website. I monitored that site for a while, but no new releases or really any information appeared and the development email list appears to be basically dormant. In reading Dave du Verle’s blog, it’s pretty clear that he’s moved on.

And that’s okay. I for one appreciate all the time and work he put in to making SK2 as solid a tool as it was. (Thank you, Dave!) It was great to have it available while it lasted. But between Dave’s posts and also the fact that more comment spam seemed to be getting through SK2 and winding up on our site, it was rather clear to me that I would need to move at some point soon – and based on my own usage of Akismet on other personal sites, I figured I’d switch to it.

What finally made me make the switch was really the VoiceObjects acquisition and the fact that the VoiceObjects’ blog used Akismet and had an enterprise subscription that needed to be renewed. If you are renewing for one blog, you may as well do it for several…

The Akismet plugin installation was predictably very simple. I just

1. uploaded the Akismet code to our plugins directory

2. enabled its usage through “Plugin Commander” in our Site Admin
3. went to each of our main blogs and activated the plugin
4. in each blog, entered the API key from WordPress.com
5. in each blog, went to the Comments page and cleared out all the spam comments found by Akismet in its initial run.

This last point was a bit strange to me. It seems like SpamKarma 2 must not have been actually deleting the comment spam from our database even though I thought I had it set to do so. Akismet found a great number of spam comments which did not appear to be visible on the site but were apparently in the database. I found it rather strange since I had just cleared out all the SK2 “harvested spam” lists prior to de-activating it and activating Akismet.

Note that I could have installed Akismet directly into the WordPress MU mu-plugins directory and had it automagically be activated for all blogs (the latest versions of Akismet even allow you to hard-code your API key in the plugin so that you can easily protect all blogs). My main reason for not doing this was so that we would remain in compliance with our enterprise license. This license is only up to a certain number of blogs, and I want to ensure we are staying within the terms of that license.

So there we are… now protected by Akismet… we’ll see how it goes in the weeks and months ahead…

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