Well, I figured it would happen sooner or later. I chose WordPress as my blogging software for a basic reason- it’s free. I looked at using Moveable Type and am still thinking about switching over, but one thing that’s nice about WP is that there’s a free anti-comment-spam package available called Akismet.

To be honest, I haven’t been hit with comment spam in any kind of significant amount- in three months I think Akismet has caught about 5 spams.

Until today. I got hit with a bunch of spam… nothing like some blogs, I’m sure, but quite a few for me. There’s 113 comments identified as spam by Akismet sitting in my “caught spam” box in my admin panel, and Akismet is reporting that it’s caught 105 total- and there was only 5 until yesterday, which means that there were an additional 100 or so that were caught and not even put into my “might be, might not be” box.

Fortunately, because of the way that Akismet works, I only have to click on one button- “delete all”- and all these spams go right into the big bit bucket in the sky. (Or, from a Buddhist point of view, they are returned to the state of non-being, where they will remain until conditions are right for them to become spam yet again. If they had better karma, they can return as valid emails or comments!)

Something strange about the spam, though- none of the links in the comments are to gambing or porn sites. They’re all regular old media sites, like “nytimes.com” and so forth. Weird, weird, weird. Of course, I think the whole idea behind spamming is weird- I have to wonder if it’s just stupid kids screwing around with stuff.

Anyway, my blogging buddy Luis uses Moveable Type and writes frequently about his battles with spam. I know that MT has some automated solutions and add-ons to combat spam, but he has reported a few issues with them. I guess WP users are lucky in being able to leave Akismet running and comments open full time… although knowing how the game works, it’s only a matter of time before the spammers figure out a way around whatever Akismet is using to prevent the spam, and we’ll have to moderate comments again.