Akismet Blog Spam Plugin
It's a sad fact of life that we live in a world of spammers. Rather than contributing to the quality and usefulness of your blog, spammers spread links to their undesirable wares throughout blog post comments, disrupting the normal high quality conversations that take place in your blog and overall diminishing the value of your blog to your readers. Nobody likes scrolling through a dozen advertisements for Viagra in order to find comments from real people.
Dealing with blog spam can potentially waste a lot of time-in fact, some bloggers report spending more time dealing with blog spam than actually blogging. You can try blocking spammers by IP address, but the spammers always seem to be able to come from somewhere else. Links to spammers websites can also hurt your search engine rankings. By the time you get around to removing a spammers comment, the damage may already be done.
Fortunately there are helpful tools available for dealing with blog spam in an automated fashion, allowing you to spend more time doing what you do best-blogging. One of these tools is a WordPress plugin called Akismet. Akismet works by automatically submitting the content of each comment, trackback, and pingback to your blog against the Akismet service. Akisment applies a large number of checks against the submitted comment to see if it looks 'spammy'. If the comment appears to be spam, The Akismet plugin will block the comment, trackback, or pingback from showing up on your blog. Such comments are saved for you to inspect later for false positives.
With Akismet you can focus more on building your blog and your community of readers, while proactively preventing comments that lower the value and reach of your blog.
