Whilst I must confess I’ve never experienced what I’m sure is a culinary delight, spam really does leave a foul taste in my mouth, and both this site and my personal email have been getting tonnes of it recently.
Pretty much daily I’m having to put my waders on and go swimming through the shit in phpMyAdmin, manually deleting all the spam comments that get posted on here (it’s not actually that hard lol - with only one non-spam comment it’s just one simple SQL statement to delete everything except that one!).
Anyway, I’ve been meaning to do something about it for quite a while now, and I had been thinking of a number of options. These included putting all comments into a manual validation queue so I can check each one as they come in, forcing users to sign-up before posting a comment, and just getting rid of the whole comment system all together.
Putting all the comments in a queue wouldn’t have really helped, because I would still be manually checking every comment which I really don’t want to be doing.
Forcing people to sign-up just so they can post a comment is completely pointless, and will most likely result in people deciding not to bother. I know I wouldn’t. I absolutely hate being forced to sign-up to stuff, even when it’s free.
So that left me with one real option - to get rid of the comment system completely, but before I did it I stumbled upon a brilliant anti-spam tool which does all the hard work of validating the comments for me, and for free.
Akismet (cool name btw!) really is excellent, and I use the PHP 5 class here to do it.
The only downside is that you have to have a Wordpress account before you can get access to the API.
On a more positive note, I’ve started work on my next site which I’m really looking forward to getting out there on the web.