Comment Spam

Evidently, I’m under siege. Less than two weeks ago, I noted to myself that Akismet had blocked 200 spam comments since I converted the blog to WordPress (two and a half months ago). As I write this it is telling me:

Akismet has caught 1,626 spam for you since you first installed it.

That means that I’m now getting more than 100 spam comments per day! Thankfully, Akismet blocks these comments before they appear on the blog, but I still feel compelled to look them over, just in case a legitimate comment has somehow been flagged (so far, none have). As you can imagine, this is a bit of an ass-pain, so I’m now incrementally raising my defenses, hopeful of reducing the amount of ’spamments’ which are generated in the first place. The first phase of my plan was to install the Comment Timeout plugin which

automatically closes comments on blog entries after a user-configurable period of time.

Right now that ‘period of time’ is set at 60 days. This should vastly diminish the volume of ’spamments’. Fewer targets: Less spam.

I’ve also installed Bad Behavior which should keep the spam-bots from getting in in the first place.

I’m crossing my fingers.