WordPress Tip: Eliminating Spam
September 4th, 2010 | Posted in Uncategorized 4 Comments »
One way you can eliminate spam (besides activating Akismet) is by removing all the spam that shows up in comment threads on specific posts. This is because spam attracts spam. So if you can cut out spam from a post, you’re less likely to get more spam on that same post.
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If Akismet misses a spam comment definitely mark it as spam, that allows Akismet to learn about them. If you don’t mark them as spam Akismet won’t have the opportunity to learn from the mistake.
One thing Matt Mullenweg said at Wordcamp is that everyone’s Akismet experience is unique. I thought that by marking a comment as spam, it sent that commenter’s IP address to a Akismet blacklist database, so that the strategy of Akismet was a collective effort. Is that not the case?
It’s both. Akismet can learn from trends across many blogs, but also look at the difference between blogs on what they consider spam.
That allows for individual blogs to have different experiences, while still learning across all blogs.
Recently my wife’s blog was flagging a lot of valid comments as spam, so I created a new Akismet key for her. I think that helped out — not sure why certain comments were being flagged as spam, but it was a quick fix.