I am still officially on holiday so this is just going to be a short post today. When I sat down to write this post I logged into WordPress and as usual there were hundreds of comments marked as spam…
I was about to start writing about the Family Holiday and post some photos thereof but seeing all those spam comments made my heart sink. Previously I used to check through all of these messages to make sure there were no real comments that slipped through the net. In the very early days there was a message or two that ended up in the spam list. Since then though I haven’t had a single false positive result.
So why should I still check through all of those spam messages. Well the answer is that I’m not going to bother any more…
Don’t worry though as I just said pretty much all real comments seem to get through fine so there should be no difference to you, my loyal readers. If on the rare occasion that you do post a comment and you don’t see it appear either immediately if you are a previous commenter or after a couple of days for your first comment—I have to approve comments from new commenters—then the comment may have been caught by the spam filter.
Just sent me a direct message, tweet or even e-mail and I will dig it out for you. You can find out how to contact me on my About page.
How Is The Spam Filtered
WordPress has a plugin called Akismet that marks appropriate messages as spam. The plugin is installed as part of the initial WordPress setup but doesn’t come turned on by default.
You now have to go to their website to get an API key to allow you to use the plugin. The signup process is very straight forward but this is only free for personal websites or blogs. Otherwise there is a monthly charge for the service…
Until fairly recently this was a completely free service. Now I understand that everyone needs to make some money but this is not something I would be willing to pay for at the moment. I barely make anything from this site, not even enough to cover the hosting at the moment, so there is no way I could justify paying extra just to keep the spam under control.
If absolutely necessary then I would just have to turn off comments altogether and use some other medium like Twitter or Facebook instead.
I am sure there are some much bigger sites that would be able to justify such a cost though so I do not begrudge the charge…
The Figures
If you leave comments enabled on your WordPress site then you have to expect a huge amount of spam. As an example I have received 164 comments in total on this site since I started over a year ago. Compare this to the 2732 spam comments I have received.
Actually thinking about there was well over a thousand spam comments before I moved the blog over to Krystal Hosting. The comments were copied across in the move so that means I have received 164 comments compared to roughly 4000 spam!
Wow it’s even worse than I thought!
That means about 96% of the comments on my site are spam.
No wonder some of the blogs out there are starting to phase out comments. What with the new charges and the horrendous volume of spam, blog comments could become a thing of the past…
Image: Pete O’Shea
Let’s hope that yours does not become a thing of the past it always makes good reading and has vital information.keep it up.x