Important Lesson for Wordpress Bloggers
Now here’s an important tip for all Wordpress Bloggers out there. Be aware that Wordpress comes with Akismet plugin preloaded. Akismet is a plugin which identifies and blocks comment and trackback spam on blogs with integration to various blogging systems. What you’ll need to do is to activate plugin via the WP plugins section.
What happened was, I’ve just upgraded my Wordpress to the latest 2.5.1 with a handy tool called the Wordpress Automatic Upgrade plugin. After successfully upgrading my WP, the plugin requires me to reactivate all my plugins. You’ll need to do so or else your WP will not function properly. I’ve reactivated most of the needed plugins except for one. Yes, you guessed it, the AKISMET plugin.
So what happens if you do not reactivate your Akismet plugin? YOU GET SPAMMED!
For less than 24 hours, I got hit with 172 spams in my comment box!
So make sure you reactivate your Akismet plugin everytime you do a WP upgrade. And for those who are not using it, give it a try cause it helps … A LOT!
Don’t forget that you still need to be a member of WordPress.com in order to get the API key needed to activate Akismet.
But I use Akismet as a secondary spam filter. The first line of defense belonging to the Bad Behavior plugin. Bad Behavior filters out spam bots before they even have a chance to comment. About 85%-90% of my spam is filtered. The other 10-15% is caught by Akismet. The good thing is that with Bad Bahavior, you don’t have to manually check and delete your spam. It never reaches you in the first place.
The perfect all around defense and mind you I get about 500-1000 spam comments a day.
Haha, my akismet (with API key of course) usually filters out all spams and I had never deleted any since the day I installed it. 170+ is quite an alarming number since it was usually none. Well, it’s all good. Just though of sharing it with other fellow bloggers
Cheers
Don’t use Bad Behaviour if you have Malaysian readers because it’ll block most of them.
I recommend using this:
http://sw-guide.de/wordpress/plugins/simple-trackback-validation/
Combined with this:
http://www.hybrid6.com/webgeek/plugins/wp-spamfree
= No spam!