I recently became the target of blog spam. Someone is sending me a plethora of comments on my articles that have no use or relevance whatsoever to my blog.  Let me assure you, deleting spam everyday is something I do not want to add to my list of daily activities.

I did a Google search of what to do and found that my version of Wordpress (version 2.7) already has a plugin called Akismet that just needed to be activated to work. This was good news, however it required an API key to function which I found by signing up with Wordpress.com (not .org).

One item to note is that Akismet recommends you mark spam comments as “spam” rather than “delete” them. This educates the spam software to make it smarter for next time.

Since I have been using Akismet my comments spam has been much more manageable.

Some bloggers use a CAPTCHA method before a comment can be submitted. While this is common for many websites requiring a login or signup feature, I have not commonly seen this for commenting on blogs. One website I found this method was The Internet Marketing Driver, which seems to be an even more effective method of controlling spam. Akismet will be good enough for me at this time however.