There is one thing that never gets the respect it deserves, that little plug-in in WordPress (and Drupal amongst others) that detects spam for you and throws it into a folder for your review or if you are trusting enough, deletion. Akismet. The name is short for Automattic Kismet and is free for public use in an attempt to reduce and hopefully eliminate comment and trackback spam. (check it out here)
Its a database of spam that all incoming comments are compared against to determine if they are spam. If they are they get put into your Akismet folder for you to review and determine if anything was caught accidentally and if so, you can mark it as “not spam”. Its a steadily growing and advancing list of spam that you never have to update yourself, or maintain in any way. Once its installed, you just have to remember to clear it out once in a while.
Without it, I’d be wading through comments daily trying to determine which are relevant and which are just crap or from bots. If you have a blog that allows comments you should definitely be using it to help weed out all the advertisements for porn sites and online pharmacies trying to sell you a huge assortment of discount pills.
So, on behalf of myself and a lot of others, thanks.
tcg
barkerp 