Related Articles

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  How to Identify and Stop Blog Comment Spam

  3445 readersAs a follow up to Jonathan Bailey’s great post yesterday, Blogging Pitfalls: Becoming a Spammer, I wanted to talk about comment spam a bit more.  Bloggers are often inundated with comment spam, which can get so bad that they might even reconsider moderating comments. Unfortunately, there are some forms of comment spam that have gotten out

• Changes Slated For Akismet

  3447 readersJoseph Scott who is working on the Akismet plugin for WordPress notified everyone via the WordPress core development blog that there would be some changes coming to Akismet, starting with version 2.5. In version 2.5 of the plugin, there will be some new files added such as admin.php, akismet,css, akismet.js, and widget.php. There will also

• How To Mimic The WPTavern Commenting System

  5230 readersOver the past few days, I’ve had a couple of people ask me what plugins I use to accomplish my commenting system here on WPTavern.com. I’m not a fan of using a third party system so in no particular order, here are the plugins I use. Akismet – I’ve had no problems with Akismet taking

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  Akismet Worst Offenders Extension

  146 readersNow even plugins are getting plugins, as Richard Boakes adds onto Akismet, a powerful and popular anti-comment spam plugin for WordPress and other software. The extension, allows for users to easily see and delete mass groupings of spam easily. It shows you the worst offenders, IP Addresses of computers sending you the most spam, and allows

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  Brief DNS outage

  26943 readersOn Jan 17th at 20:52 UTC there was a network outage that caused the Akismet.com DNS servers to be unavailable for 12 minutes. The problem has since been fixed, and everything is back to normal now. This means that for some blogs, there was a brief window where the Akismet API servers were unavailable. If

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  20 Billion Served

  7963 readersToday Akismet caught its 20 billionth spam. That’s an average of around 10 million per day over the 5 years since Akismet first launched. Currently we deal with 30 million spam comments on a typical day, or about 350 per second. To put that in perspective: if Akismet users had to spend one second manually

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  Do Not Delete Comment Spam. Mark Spam as Spam.

  6981 readersIs comment spam one of the things that gets you down? Are you taking it personally? Are you confused by comment spam and how to handle it? I’ve been speaking at a variety of meetups lately on web publishing, blogging, and podcasting, and the topics often turn to managing comments and comment spam. “I’ve started

• Akismet Gets a Facelift

  3968 readersAkismet was one of Automattic’s first projects, and after 5 years of sporting the same design, the entire site has received a major facelift. On first glance, the new site presents Akismet’s benefits in a much clearer way, and offers clearer distinction between the free and paid licenses. Fans of the old spam stats will

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  WordPress hack: Get rid of HTML in comments

  3473 readersHTML in comments can be a good things, but many times people abuse it, for example by inserting links. In this recipe, I'll show you how you can automatically get rid of any HTML entered in your post comments.Looking for WordPress hosting? Try WP Web Host. Prices starts at $5/month and you can try it

• Plugin Review: WP Mollom

  153 readersWe hate spam. We hate it so much that we always find solutions to spam. So, this week we continue our Weekly Plugin Review series with a review of an Akismet alternative called Mollom. Description: This plugin makes it possible to use the anti-spam services provided by Mollom on your own WordPress blog. What is Mollom? It’s