OK, please humour me with this nerdy post but sometimes I can’t help myself. Up until recently and like most self-hosted WordPress bloggers I was using a spam blocking service called Akismet… it’s not bad but I had to extend my spam prevention by also adding a CAPTCHA to my comment box. This worked great for my regular comments (your know who you are and thank you by the way) but was very sporadic for new comments. Then I discovered Mollum! For a small fry like me in web world it’s a free service and it works so well.
Mollom divides your comments into Spam (unwanted comments) and Ham (legitimate comments). Mostly spam disappears into a cyber black hole and I never see it. Take my graph – see that big spike on March 29 – that was 516 spam attempts on my site – can you believe it? Of those 516 Mollom delivered 2 comments that to me were spam but they weren’t sure so they deliver it anyway. In WordPress there’s a Mollom plugin that connects to your Mollom account and it’s from here that I moderate these comments. It pays to tag these comments as spam because that goes back to Mollom and helps them become bigger, greater, stronger spam prize fighters.
Oh and as an extension to this I’ve added an Ask a Question widget that takes you through to my Formspring page. I get some many questions from bloggers on how to change their blogs so this is a space to ask those burning technical questions… feel free to refer your friends.