Word Press and Akismet —“ help needed
I use Word Press as my blogging tool and Akismet to fight back against comment spam. Both work great and I do love them – for their effectiveness, ease of use, and for the fact that they do what they say they will do.
I was just reading Lorelle VanFossen’s post: I’m Winning the Battle Against Comment Spam.
Blogs by nature are tools of social interaction. Social interaction, commenting, and discussion are the modus operandi behind blogging. Lorelle’s post is a good intro into how to keep it that way, without going overboard in shutting off the ability to interact because of some bad apples.
Well, following his her guidelines have helped me win the battle (thus far) and to engage new friends from a lot of different places. However, I do have an issue and I can’t seem to find the answer.
I use the Yahoo! installation of Word Press and their modified version of Akismet. Every few days my spam count gets reset to zero. I’ve searched and searched for an answer and I cannot seem to find anyone who’s experienced the same.
I’m running WP 2.0.2 with the following active plugins:
Audio player 1.2.3
Akismet for Yahoo! 1.12-Yahoo
Creative Commons Configurator 0.2
Digital Fingerprint Beta 0.2
Dagon Design Form Mailer 4.2
Flickr Widget 0.1
SimpleTagsPlus 1.0
wp-cache 2.0.17
WordPress Database Backup 1.7
Sidebar Widgets 1.0.20060711
Any ideas on how to overcome this behavior?
“She” has an answer for you. Depending upon your Akismet panel settings, you may have the option to set Akismet to delete “old comment spam” on a X-number of days schedule. Usually it is 15 days. If you haven’t deleted them, Akismet will do that automatically.
I don’t know what Yahoo has set up, but you may want to ask them directly or check their FAQ page to see what their settings are for that modified version of Akismet.
Comment spam sits in the database, and if you get hit a lot, that adds to the size of your database, taking up “space”. Cleaning it out shrinks your database size and keeps it under control. I once had over 10 megs of comment spam in my WordPress database. Outrageous. So I’m thrilled that Akismet keeps it down automatically.
So check with Yahoo on how they’ve set this auto function.
Thanks and sorry…
The funny thing was that I was up to nearly 1,000 spam comments since I began – I deleted the comments manually after double checking for any good stuff they may have gotten captured (happened only once). After going back to zero, it got up to about 135, then back to zero. Now its up to 172…
On your blog I noticed you have an Akismet counter. How does it keep accumulating even though the spam has been deleted?
The Akismet counter is a widget supplied by Akismet and WordPress.com. I’m sure there’s an Akismet counter plugin somewhere. I find these things clutter blogs as they honestly provide worthless information, but Matt asked me to put it there to help promote Akismet, and since I blog about it, it was a good idea.
So you’re not talking about the comment spam. You are talking about some kind of counter that keeps score.
Honestly, who cares. Protecting your blog from comment spam should stay invisible. This isn’t a competition. Promote the snot out of Akismet doing a great job in a post, and then get back to the business of your blog, the more important stuff.
Does that help?
You are right in that it is not important, but when a behavior changes I get concerned. I dabble (maybe I shouldn’t) and thought I messed up an intended dashboard behavior.
The reason I pointed out the counter on your blog was because of its action. I just wanted to point to the behavior, not the counter itself. I used to have a counter and took it off for the very reasons you mention.
Always glad to help.
It’s really amazing how much we clutter up our blogs with unnecessary clutter. For example, if people have a favorite social bookmarking service, the odds are that they also have a bookmarklet or utility that helps them easily add sites to their bookmarking service. Yet, bloggers insist on supplying tons of cluttering links to “help” them bookmark their posts.
I’m a fan of the lean and clean look, emphasizing design elements rather than clutter.
Actually, I should have said: emphasizing design elements AND CONTENT rather than clutter. 😉 Content matters most.
I think, with your site, it works so well, first based on the content, but secondly because of the color theme. The sidebar blends and is barely noticable unless you are specifically looking at it. A kind of there but not there effect. The content stands right up and out there.