I’ve had my ups and downs with Akismet, but I gotta admit that after catching over 100,000 spams for me, I can’t seem to part with it. Sure, it catches a few that it shouldn’t from time to time. And sometimes I don’t check my spam queue as thoroughly as I perhaps should. But in the little over two years that I’ve been running this site, it’s caught over 100k in spam messages.
I’m fairly certain that there are other spam catchers out there that perform just as well, but Akismet is integrated into WordPress, so it gets the easy nod. I’ve tried programs like spam karma and really didn’t like it at all. Akismet is easy to use and aside from the occasional <1% false positives, it does a really good job.
About Shane Ede
I started off with Akismet and found it a pain in the ass that I had to register an account and then do this and do that.
Spam Karma works great for me because it’s so much more configurable e.g. I can specify that comments on older posts with no recent activity are more likely to be spam-laden.
To each their own!
Despite running Akismet I still wasn’t happy with the amount of spam bots still leaving their rubbish in my comments table so I change the action filename that the comments post to (wp-comments-post.php for WordPress) and of course update the comments template file. Most spam bots will just know to post their rubbish directly to this file with certain post numbers in (hence why certain posts get spammed more often than others), so if you rename this file and then set htaccess to return a 410 for the original file you’ve stopped spam from even reaching Akismet or Spam Karma 😉
SarahG, that is a spectacular idea. I’m going to have to give it a try! Thanks for sharing!
If you want to know more about what SarahG is talking about, be sure to visit the link in the above trackback.
askimet can have false positives .. very often IMO