The Engineered Boulderer

In my previous post I complained of all the comment spam I received. The deluge yesterday was the last straw and I upgrade wordpress today. Along with the upgrade I got a Wordpress API key and activated the Akismet plugin.

Several of my “online” friends have spoken well of Akismet, and funnily enough, the first comment since my Wordpress upgrade was a recommendation for Akismet. Although his comment came too late, I want to thank Eby for taking the time to write a few lines.

Along with my upgrade to Wordpress 2.0.3 I also moved my site from www.jonas.rabbe.com to jonas.rabbe.com along with the no-www plugin by PhotoMatt. No more WWW on my site.

I also moved Susan’s site from Movable Type to Wordpress. I still haven’t designed a theme for her, but I hope she’ll like Wordpress as much as I do. With her move came 143 comments, how many of those are comment spam I don’t know, at least Wordpress is easier for deleting comments than Movable Type 2.66. And as a final gesture I deleted the last traces of Movable Type from our web server.

Update: Now I’ve had Akismet running for about a week, and I have had no comment spam. Of course, I pretty much haven’t had any comments either. To tell you the truth, it’s a bit worrying. I’ve been used to getting several hundred comments spams over a weekend, and not even getting any in the Akismet spam queue is a little weird. I don’t know if it’s because I haven’t received any comments, or if they have just been deleted silently, correct me if I’m wronge, but I don’t think Akismet does that.

Oopsdate: I turned off the auto moderate plugin, but forgot to remove the function call from the theme. In that simple way I made it impossible for anyone to comment on my site explaining why I didn’t receive any at all. Thanks to Joen for spotting that.

Final update: Removing the function call did the trick, at least I’ve received plenty of comment spam since last night. And one even came through Akismet… tsk. tsk. tsk…

Comment spam has, unfortunately, been a part of blogging for me pretty much from the start. It was the reason I changed the wordpress with it’s easier comment administration interface.

Lately however, it has become extreme. Yesterday I received 541 pieces of comment spam! If that is not extreme I don’t know what is, especially for a site with maybe 100-200 unique hits a day, the majorite of whom are viewing one page.

The high number of comment spam has also highlighted another problem. I have all new comments (from people who haven’t commented before) go into the moderation queue where I then delete them before they turn up on my page. Loading a page with 515 comments (I had deleted some during the day yesterday) takes a looooooooong time. In fact it takes so long that the Textile 2 plugin I use for formatting my entries and comments times out… I actually have to turn off the plugin to delete all the comment spam.

I guess it’s about time I start thinking about upgrading Wordpress and looking into comment spam plugins.