In my last post, Blog spam: yuck!, I described the annoyance that spam brings bloggers every day. In fact, right before I started writing this post, I just deleted four more spam comments (BTW, it’s a good habit to check your comments the same time every day — I check mine every morning). Guess how long it took me to remove these spam comments. Zero seconds.

How? I have the Akismet (automatic kismet) plugin for WordPress installed. This little puppy scans the comments on my blog, runs a series of tests, and places what it believes are spam comments into a, you guessed it, a spam folder! I have 15 days to flag any comment as ‘not spam’, otherwise, it gets thrown away. Since this spam fighter does such a great job, about 90% of what it puts in that spam folder is actually spam. In addition, Akismet comes along with a bunch of reporting tools that allow me, a stat freak, to study all kinds of useful information such as spam detected, ham detected (legitimate comment), missed spam, and false positives.

OK, next question, how much does Akismet cost? Zero cents. I do need to clarify, if you are making less than $500 per month on your blog, Akismet is free. Otherwise, it costs $5 per month.

So if you’re looking for a tool to save you time and practically eliminate all embarrassing comments (can’t help you if your friends are posting idiotic comments), Akismet is all you’ll need…if you’re using WordPress. If you’re using another platform, like blogger, sorry, you’ll have to find another spam hero.

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