One month with Akismet

Posted on December 8, 2007 
Filed Under Blogging, Tools

Last month while attending BlogWorld I had the opportunity to hang out with Matt Mullenweg, the founding developer of WordPress, at the WordPress Meet-Up. One of the topics we spoke about was Akismet, the spam blocking plugin. I had used Akismet a few years back, but had run in to some issues with it. At that time I found Spam Karma and started using it exclusively. A few drinks, a little dinner and some great conversations later, I headed home to give Akismet another shot.

I downloaded and installed the latest copy of Akismet on 2 blogs; geeeek.com and austinsink.com. While this blog has been around for several years, austinsink.com is relatively new and I was curious how it would handle the two. Would I seed any differences between a blog that receives a TON of spam and a blog that receives hardly any.

geeeek.com results
Total Comments: 10,724
Real Comments: 33 (0.30 %)
Spam Comments: 10,691 (99.7 %)
False Positives: 0
Uncaught Spam: 0
Uncaught Spam Pingback: 1

austinsink.com results
Total Comments: 73
Real Comments: 14 (23.72 %)
Spam Comments: 59 (76.28 %)
False Positives: 0
Uncaught Spam: 0
Uncaught Spam Pingback: 1

Overall I have to say I’m really pleased with Akismet. In the 2 months leading up to the switch, Spam Karma had been doing a great job of keeping the spam out of my blog and had zero false positives, but I was receiving a hefty amount of spam pingbacks that were all going uncaught.

I did have a bit of “user error” the first few days I was running Akismet. In the Options -> Discussion settings on WordPress, I had left the following box checked:

WordPress Settings 

This setting was being overruled by Spam Karma. When I switched to Akismet, all comments needed to be approved prior to showing up on the blog. I was under the impression that all my comments were being held up as spam and I was counting these as false positives. I unchecked the box and the comments were flowing freely to the blog without my intervention. All is right in the world again, yeah.

So for now, I’m going to stick with Akismet. It seems to be doing the job fantastically.

Share and Enjoy: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
  • Digg
  • del.icio.us
  • BlinkList
  • Furl
  • Reddit
  • Simpy
  • Slashdot
  • Technorati

Comments

5 Responses to “One month with Akismet”

  1. Andy on December 17th, 2007 7:05 pm

    I’ll need to start getting comments before this service will be necessary. ;) Hey, off topic, but what would you recommend in a list management site for a company that’s getting about a million uniques a year? They have zero sign ups now, so no conversion is necessary.

  2. John on December 18th, 2007 12:24 am

    @Andy, Wow, a million uniques a year? I’m not sure about a service that will handle that much of a load. By the time a list gets that big, I almost expect somebody to have a custom built system to handle it.

    But, with that said, there are 3 that I know of who could probably handle that type of volume:
    http://aweber.com/
    http://icontact.com/
    http://constantcontact.com/

    I would STRONGLY suggest you sign up for all 3 (I believe they all have free trial offers) and test out the functionality of signing up for a mailing list, and also the email newsletter sending process.

    Pricing may also come in to play. I would expect to pay at least $1,000 a year for a million records.

    Hope that helps!

  3. Andy on December 18th, 2007 1:56 am

    Ah, statistics. The million is unique visitors at the current pace. We’ll not get all of ‘em to sign up. I’d expect to get 15% uptake on the newsletter once the content in in place, but even with that rate we’d get 150,000 sign ups in the next year. So, even at this pace it will be a large list soon. I’ll check these services out. Thanks! Or as we say in Venice - Thanks!

  4. Andy on December 18th, 2007 1:57 am

    is in place

  5. Vaibhav on May 11th, 2008 1:42 am

    Here’s what I have done to combat spam comments on my blog (and yes, Akismet is a big part of it): http://blog.gadodia.net/tips-to-fight-comment-spam-on-your-blog/

Leave a Reply