I have good news for WordPress users (people who have a blog or website powered by the open source [free] website content management system [CMS] called WordPress)! You can get rid of spam from your website comments. Akismet is the answer.
I was getting at least 50-100 comments on my blog every day – I needed to either approve, reply to or mark as spam. At the beginning it was very hard to identify some of the spam comments from the real comments but I quickly learnt to spot the format, the lack of specific mention to the topic you had posted and certain IP addresses kept recurring.
After a year of having to individually go through each comment and click the spam button I got fed up and started looking for a solution and I found it in the WordPress plugin, Akismet blog spam filtering. I activated it last week and I am pleased to announce that in 5 days I have not had 1 single spam comment. Actually, I haven’t had one comment at all 🙁 but that’s not the point.
I downloaded the Akismet Blog Spam Filter for my WordPress Blog and my spam reduced to zero immediately
The best thing about the Akismet blog spam filter, is that they ask you how much you think its worth, and that’s how much you pay. They have a sliding scale that you move up and down to determine how much you want to pay. I chose to pay $30 for my annual personal subscription to Akismet.
The difficult thing with this type of business model is that you’re asked to decide how valuable the product is, before you’ve used it. Now that I’ve experienced what the Akismet blog spam filter can do for me and my blog and my time management, I would be prepared to pay much more. And so next year I might pay $200 for the tool and I guess that’s where their value proposition comes in, hoping that loyal users will reward them for their customer first business model in subsequent years.
How painful is blog and website comment spam for you and how much would you pay for a solution that will make it all go away, with a few clicks of a button?