Comments on: Three Akismet Hacks to Improve Perfomance, Reduce Spam

By: Elliott Back

Elliott Back — Sun, 17 Dec 2006 19:17:26 +0000

It works.

By: CR

CR — Sun, 17 Dec 2006 19:16:01 +0000

The akismet plugin link doesn’t work anymore?

By: Coding Horror

Coding Horror — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 23:41:57 +0000

Whitelist, Blacklist, Greylist…

I recently got into a spirited discussion about Akismet. What is Akismet? When a new comment, trackback, or pingback comes to your blog it is submitted to the Akismet web service which runs hundreds of tests on the comment……

By: kwa

kwa — Sun, 24 Sep 2006 06:04:20 +0000

Elliott, I’ve been deeper than you did: I blocked blacklisted IPs (using miscellaneous DNS RBLs) from viewing my blog, so even referrer spammers have been blocked. The main issue was about 5 to 10% real visitors were blocked as well.

For sure, using DNS RBLs filters more spammers. However, it also filters legitimate comments as well. The main issue here is people who post comments often have blogs. And they talk about other blogs. If you reject their comments, they won’t comment your blog, they won’t come back to read other comments and they won’t talk about your blog neither.

It’s probably better to have to remove spam manually than preventing opinion leaders (what other bloggers are) to participate to your blog by leaving an interesting comment on it.

By: Elliott Back

Elliott Back — Sat, 23 Sep 2006 21:47:45 +0000

IP blacklisting is definitely a technique for the heavily spammed. It will lead to more false positives, but if you don’t mind that price, it should also heavily decrease the amount of spam getting through the filter.