Excuse this non-candy and slightly techie post about the site…….
It wasn’t too long after I started Candy Addict that spam comments were overwhelming me and the site. I had to spend time each day deleting all of the irrelevant and sometimes vulgar comments being left by spammers. I poked around and found a great spam catcher called Akismet. Akismet spots the spam and doesn’t allow it to make it onto your site. It also keeps track of how much spam it catches. Today or yesterday we passed the 200,000 mark – a momentous occasion. We’re currently at 200,395.
Besides Akismet, I now run three other anti-spam measures:
- Bad Behavior – a plugin that stops spambots from even accessing the site
- Peter’s Custom Anti-Spam – creates the easy-to-read and customize captchas in the comment form. Luckily, I can choose what words are shown so I chose a bunch of candy-themed words.
- I had to turn off trackbacks. With trackbacks on, I was inundated with spam trackbacks (but they were caught by Akismet).
If I hadn’t added these other three items with Akismet, we would have hit the 200,000 a long time ago. Despite all four anti-spam measures, we still get spam, but luckily, almost none of it is published on the site for you to see. I check the comments on the site daily to see which ones need a response and which ones are spam and made it through my defenses.
Akismet uses a centralized server to determine what is and what isn’t spam. According to their numbers, 95% of all comments are spam. I bet that number is even higher for email.
Akismet has saved my life, too! I love it. The more spam you get, the more popular your site. So I guess your 200K is a good thing, in a way.
June 13th, 2007 at 9:30 am