The Akismet plugin is invaluable to bloggers who get alot of comments on their blogs. It works by blocking comments that it detects as ’spam’ comments and holds them in moderation until you review them, or you can set it to automatically delete everything after a certain amount of time.

If you’re not sold on the idea yet, just have a look at some of the automated messages that spammers send as comments. It actually makes sense and seems like a good comment that a reader has left on your blog, but clicking back on the link of the commentor and you’ll find that it’s probably a website selling domain names or something similar like that.

Also, I encourage people to always set comment moderation to ‘on’ even with Akismet installed as some messages do get through their filters. On one of my other blogs, I get an average of 20 – 30 spam messages a day caught by Akismet.

Imagine getting 30 messages like this for every post that you write? And imagine having to go through your ‘comments awaiting moderation’ every day deleting these one by one. Install Akismet, it’s a must, and it’s FREE.

N/B: Check through your spam folder every once in a while as Akismet also does catch messages that isn’t actually SPAM. But this happens very rarely, but better to be safe than sorry right?

Happy spam catching,

-William Lee