It has been a minor annoyance for me, since I get a few every week and have to manually remove them.

Fortunately, Jeff Starr (of Digging into WordPress fame) has come up with a solution. Apparently you can put Unicode characters into the WordPress comment blacklist…which of course would include Cyrillic characters. I don’t know why I didn’t think of that to begin with, it’s so simple.

Anyway, his post includes several characters you can copy and paste into your blacklist.

10 Characters for Your WordPress Blacklist [Perishable Press]

Now that looks like a lot of something. Too bad it’s spam. Yes, this graph is generated from Akismet’s log of the spam comments it has caught over time.

Amazing isn’t it? In one day, such as September second last year, this very blog would have been slammed with 848 spam comments if not for the aid of the Akismet spam filters? Imagine if we didn’t have such defenses; the internet would be an unbearable, and running a blog would be a nightmare. We may complain to no end about the spam messages that slip through, but I think we all know that it could be a lot worse.

I don’t like spam messages of any kind, but at least emails aren’t public. Comment and forum spammers earn the most of my contempt. To me, leaving spam comments is far worse than sending a few spam emails.

Thank you, Akismet developers, for helping to keep the nasty stuff to a tolerable level. Turning your plugin off for even a week would be suicide.

I think I can speak for everybody (who isn’t a bloodsucking scoundrel) when I say spam is a plague. Note that when I say I don’t like spam, I refer to the digital kind and not the tasty, canned lunch meat.

(Spam sketch by Monty Python)

I think it’s safe to say that 98% of WordPress users (I made that number up, just so you know) use Akismet.

But what about the web newbies, just installing WordPress for the first time? You know, the people who don’t have a whole lot of experience with the web, but heard about blogging and WordPress, and decided to set it up with Fantastico on a cheap shared webhost. Those people are in for an unpleasant surprise…

Akismet, by default is deactivated, therefore unprotected. The equivalent of running a Windows-based PC on the internet without a firewall and antivirus, the blog will be slammed with spam pretty quick. It may not be a lot at first, but it will happen.

And not only is Akismet not activated by default, it’s buried on the Plugins page, where non-techies aren’t necesarily going to look. Then you need an API key to use the plugin, which requires registering for a blog at WordPress.com (a most confusingly named site) and then hunting down the page with the API key and pasting it into the plugin settings on your blog.

Here’s how it should work: When you first install WordPress, it should gently nudge you to activate Akismet, and like to the Plugins tab. When you activate the plugin, it should request that you enter your API key, and instead of telling you to get one from WordPress.com, link to Akismet.com, and let them applu for one there.

One problem, however, is spam. Virtually all forums are plagued by spam posts and user registrations, creating hours of tedious work for the administrators.

I just found an SMF mod that implements Akismet for the SMF system: SMF-Akismet.

If only I’d found it a year ago, when I really needed it!

I will take this opportunity to point you in the direction of the Akismet Development page. If you head over there, you can find libraries for PHP and other languages, as well as plugins for other CMS and forum scripts (like phpBB or Joomla). Akismet can be used nearly anywhere that comment spam is a problem.