A Quarter of a Million and Counting

This blog has now attracted over a quarter of a million spam comments. Fortunately the vast majority are stopped by the Akismet spam filter, which is provided on the WordPress.com blog service.

But it’s quite clear that without the spam filter it would be a very time-consuming task for me to manually delete spam comments. And if I didn’t do this the effectiveness of the blog as a forum for discussions would be severely reduced.

I could change the blog settings and require comments to require approval before they are published – but this would also be time-consuming for me.

Or comments could be restricted to registered users – but this would add a barrier to those who wished to comment, especially those who aren’t regular visits to the blog.

I could also disable comments on posts after a certain period of time, which should reduce the amount of spam comment – but just because a post was made some time ago doesn’t mean that comments would not be useful.

I’m happy with the policy  of allowing comments , complemented by use of Akismet to automatically capture spam (although, I should add, sometimes Akismet traps legitimate comments).  But if you’re setting up a blog and are thinking about your policy on comments you’ll need to bear in mind the need to manage spam comments. And remember that Akismet is licensed software – although Akismet state that “We love non-profits. We have half-off and free pricing for registered non-profits, please see the link above.”.