Every so often, Mike will post some nifty little trick or tool he uses that makes doing X, Y or Z about a hundred times easier than some would argue it has to be–thanks for the Google Analytics pointer, by the way. So it surprised the hell out of me when he wrote this post at the beginning of the month about having to deal with comment spam. And, I had to wonder. How in the hell does a guy who’s been blogging on one platform for longer than I’ve been blogging on 3 deal with it?
In his defense, he uses Movable type, which has okay–though definitely not great–spam catching and destroying abilities. But it needs a *lot* of manual intervension to do it. Part of the reason I got fed up and switched to LiveJournal for a couple years, and then eventually to WordPres–the self-hosted version. They too used to require by default a hell of a lot of manual intervension in the spam department.
Now, though, since I’m not exactly sure which version, they make use of the Akizmet plugin for catching and either holding or deleting spam before it gets posted to the blog. Since making use of this plugin, and granted the blog’s only been around for about 3 months or so, I’ve only ever had perhaps two spam comments make themselves known in this little corner of the intertubes. For comparison’s sake, there are currently 34 comments waiting for me to boot them out of the spam queue, and a total of 129 that were caught altogether by the plugin. Compare that with my old MT blog, now sadly very very neglected and collecting plenty of spam on really old entries. In its prime, on that blog, I’d spend probably an hour a day picking spam comments out of my entries and tossing them in the pile to be later set on fire. I’d of given my first born for an Akizmet-like plugin for use on that platform. And, of course, now that I’m no longer using MT, I learn they have one. If I knew then what I know now, and all that stuff.
Movable Type made me hate spam. WordPress made me kill it. And Akizmet’s to blame. I’m 3 months virtually spam free, and so far, I’m lovin’ it.