Comments on: Banning Comment Spam

By: Working at Home on the Internet

Working at Home on the Internet — Tue, 28 Nov 2006 17:56:00 +0000

[...] Banning Comment Spam [...]

By: Joe

Joe — Wed, 28 Jun 2006 20:40:51 +0000

Hey Liz,
I turned it off because I don’t seem to have the problems you have with the paid-political-spammers that you have.
So far, since I installed Akismet, I have only had Friends stop over.
I hope it stays that way.
Joe

By: Liz Strauss

Liz Strauss — Wed, 28 Jun 2006 20:30:21 +0000

I wish I could turn the first comment moderation off. But it doesn’t work for me. I get slammed whenever I try to. I think it’s the Net Neutrality folks.

Your about page looks wonderful, as does all of your new blog. Welcome home Joe.
Liz

By: Joe

Joe — Wed, 28 Jun 2006 19:25:42 +0000

Hey Chris,
I don’t remember getting the “second” E-mail, I looked and even looked in my deleted folder, I couldn’t find anything.
The API Key from the WP.com seems to be working just fine for now. As long as it works, I don’t care how.
I only put the Moderation on the first comment because I couldn’t get Akismet to work in the beginning, I may take that off, most people don’t cause any problems with comments, and I don’t want people to have to wait for approval.
I will make a decision today on that.
Joe
BTW Chris,
Since I have links to a lot of old posts that still point to the Blogger address, I put a forward message back here in the template so it shows on ALL POSTS.
You may want to consider something like that for your old Blog.
J.

By: Chris Cree

Chris Cree — Wed, 28 Jun 2006 19:05:39 +0000

Joe, I know what you mean about the spam. I got hit several times early on too. Fortunately I had Askimet up and running by then and it caught them cold.

I sent them packing, and for the most part they haven’t come back.

As far as the API key goes, it was a source of confusion for me too. The WordPress site is not very clear on that. They say you have to register with them to get the Key, but you don’t have to start up a new blog with them as host.

However every time I tried to get the key, it kept steering me towards starting a new blog on their site, which I did not want to do.

Once you register with WP they send you a welcome email. What they don’t really tell you is that they also send you a second email with the API key in it after the welcome email.

If you register with WP they should send you the emails, even without starting a new blog with them.

Then you can put that API key into Askimet and be good to go.

The whole API key thing is not very clear. I only figured it out because I can be intensely stubborn.

All that said, I’m not sure they even require you to have a separate key for each individual install, so you may be just fine using the one you already had. I don’t know.

I’m a fan of Askimet. I don’t have any kind of comment moderation on at this point. I may eventually go the route you did, moderating the first comment, if I start getting nasties in there.

The only gotcha I’ve seen so far is that Askimet sometimes holds legitimate comments. I’m OK with that, as long as I remember to keep an eye on it and let the legitimate comments loose from time to time.