Tag: spam

  • Would I like to link to your spammy article? Let me think…

    Hi there! You are most likely here because I sent you a link to this post in response to an email from you which probably sounded something like this:

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  • The most useful WordPress plugin ever

    Like most bloggers, I see a fair share of comment spam. This used to be a problem, as I didn’t have a good way of filtering them out, meaning I set the comment option to Approve all. After I moved from Blogger to WordPress, I was tipped off about a plugin called Akismet.
     
    The lovely thing about it is that it checks incoming comments against a blacklist created by the entire community of people using Akismet, meaning that, whenever someone marks something as spam, the central blacklist is updated. Having run on WordPress for three months, the current tally is 668 spam comments caught, six false positives, and one spam comment not caught.
     
    Akismet is simple, quick to set up, and, most importantly, it just works.

  • Reducing spam – the advantage to having a top level domain

    I post comments in many blogs, and for a while, I had a serious problem that whenever I posted my comment with my emailadress, I’d soon see a marked increase in spammail. This all really cleared up when I actually got my own top level domain, razumny.no, and here’s how:
     
    Once the domain was up and running, I started setting up my email accounts. What I did was create one adress, and then set that up as a catch-all adress, so that anything ending it (at) razumny . no would go to my main adress. Once that was done, I started setting up adresses wherever I’d leave a comment, so that when I commented at RennyBA’s Terella, the adress would reflect that.
     
    The point to all of this is elegant in its simplicity; whenever I get an email sent to one of the catch-all adresses, I see which one it is. The practical upshot of this is that if I see an increase in spam to a specific adress, I’ll just block that one adress. This way, I don’t have to set up loads and loads of adresses, and I still keep spam at an absolute minimum.
     
    Another advantage to this setup is, of course, that whenever I spell my email address out to someone, it doesn’t really matter what they put in front of the @-sign, it’ll get to me.