Akismet : Getting rid of blog spam

Caught this over on techcrunch.

I actually had the akismet wordpress plugin installed for a long time but hadn’t gotten around to enabling it until now. I forgot I had a wordpress.com account and it needs a wordpress.com API key to function.

Either way, it’s active now and right away caught 30 comment spams. I’ve got ~3600 comments awaiting moderation right now and I suspect that ~99% of them are spam. It’s gotten to the point where I don’t even care to wade through the mess and manually moderate.

By all accounts Akismet works wonders. Provided you don’t make a lot of money off your blog, it’s completely free to use and dead simple to install. System-wide statistics are available here. 53,932 approved messages today, 1,370,133 rejected spam messages today.