It’s been four months since I switched on the Askimet anti-spam plug-in on this site. Since then, it’s been working rather hard…
Nigh on ten thousand of the bloody things have been caught in it’s queue. In the last few weeks not a single piece of spam has gotten past it, and in that same time, it hasn’t had a single false positive.
What has been happening, however, is that a good few comments by real people have been getting caught in the moderation queue, because they’re posting from a new IP or something. Which is annoying (for me anyway). So, in the finest blog traditions, I’m turning off that side of moderation. No longer will (most) people have to wait for their comment to be moderated. They may have to wait if it appears spamworthy enough to get into the Akismet queue, but I don’t think that’ll happen too often, and if there are too many links in it then it’ll be held for a quick check. And if Akismet suddenly starts missing loads, things may change.
But, on the whole, comment moderation has been done away with.
Which is nice.
It must be your magnetic personality that attracts spammers.
Clearly so.
The problem with things like askimet plugin I find is that on their own all they do is protect the weblog front end from spam, they don’t protect you. You still have to check the spam to see if it’s really spam or Nelly posting porn again, which is a hog on time. That’s why I like little capchas (like the ‘what colour is an orange one I had back in the day when I had such things) as well as spam filters, a simple captcha kills nearly all spam dead without you ever having to go look at it.
I thought about that, but I generally dislike capchas. They’re especially annoying when you ‘fail’ them. Nothing says that your life is a disappointment like Blogger letting you know that you failed a humanity test.