So in the last few weeks I’ve recieved almost 3000 pieces of comment spam on my blog. They’ve come in large chunks which made picking out valid comments both time consuming and annoying. After doing this a couple times I decided I had had enough and thought I’d try out Akismet. It’s a plugin available for multiple blogging software including the software running awardtour, namely Wordpress.

Akistmet is the first product of Automattic, a company founded by the creator of Wordpess Matt Mullenweg. The plugin works by sending all your comments to Akismet and only comments that pass their check get sent back to your blog. You can mark comments that sneak through as spam and if you really want you can check flagged comments for false positives for up to 15 days.

I installed akismet about 10 minutes ago and it’s already caught 38 pieces of spam. Almost all of which is coming from Russia and is for porn sites (of which a stunning majority is anal porn sites of both the straight and gay nature. At least we can take some comfort in knowing that spammers aren’t homophobes)

update: 900+ pieces of spam stopped this weekend, no false positives, 1 piece of spam got through, and josh submitted a fake piece of spam which actually got through.