I’ve just installed the new Akismet anti-spam plug-in for WordPress. I’m not sure that I like the way that usage is conditional upon signing up for wordpress.com and downloading and using Flock – but it looks like it works. It’s cleared out nearly 4000 spam messages from the grayblog archives at the time of installation. Since then, I’ve been upstairs and taken a bath. In that time, it has detected and quarantined more than 150 new spam messages. Yikes.
Admittedly, most of these messages would not have come to my attention previously because my use of the WordPress blacklist feature actually picked out the vast majority of spam that I was receiving, but occasionaly something was getting through, and usually in large quantities at one time. This seems promising and I’ll report if there are any major new developments as I use it.
(Another thirteen in the time it took to type this – thank goodness for the auto-delete feature, which clears out any comment in the moderation queue that is more than a fortnight old).
separating the wanted from the unwanted