Over the last couple of weeks, spam comments on my blog have been gradually increasing, to the point where it’s getting a little annoying.  I’m constantly deleting spam comments from my Wordpress control panel, and I’m sure you’ll agree it gets fairly repetitive after a while.

So I’ve installed the Wordpress plug-in Akismet, which automatically detects and deletes spam comments.  Akismet holds a database of known spammers, and when spam comments are posted to your blog posts, Akismet deletes them.  If you look to the right hand side of this blog post, you’ll see the Akismet widget which shows the number of spam comments deleted so far.  At the time of writing, Akismet has deleted 79 spam comments, and that’s over less than 24 hours.

This is a great time-saver for me, as I no longer need to worry about deleting spam comments every time I log in.  One or two spam comments I can handle, but over 50 a day?  Give me a break.

If you’re using Wordpress as your blogging platform, then go to the Wordpress Plugins page, type in Akismet in the search field and download it to your desktop.  Upload to Wordpress, activate it in your control panel, and you’re good to go!

Before you can use Akismet, you need to have a Wordpress API key in order to activate it.  I didn’t have an API key, but they are easy to obtain, just register with Wordpress.com (with or without the blog option) and your API key will be there waiting for you when you log in to your Wordpress.com control panel.  Copy the API key, and paste it into the box when activating Akismet.

As an interesting aside, the vast majority of spam comments have originated from only 2 or 3 different sources.  That’s an average of around 25 comments per spammer per day!  I’d hate to think how many spam comments would try to wing their way onto my blog if they were coming from 10, 20 or more different sources!  Scary!!  So I’d definitely recommend Akismet as a reliable way to stop spam comments being posted on your blog.

Related blog post(s):

How To Use Meta Tags With Wordpress
Made The Switch To Wordpress!

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