Efficient Akismet Spam Moderation
Posted by Jon Lee in Efficiency, tags: Akismet, Auntie-Akismet, comments, Efficiency, greasemonkey, spam-protectionTwo weeks ago, I talked about ways to prevent comment spam on your blog. Most of them required installing some sort of plug-in or tinkering. Near the bottom of that post I briefly mentioned a Greasemonkey script that can make your weekly task of moderating spam comments much more efficient.
The script is called Auntie Akismet and it requires the Greasemonkey Firefox plug-in to be installed first (installation link). If you don’t have Greasemonkey installed, I highly recommend it since it can run a lot of scripts to modify behavior of different sites. For example, it can integrate Google Reader into your Gmail.
What it Does
What Auntie Akismet does is truncate your spam comments so that no comment will be longer than a line. Most of the time, you can judge by the first line of a comment whether or not it is spam. By doing this, you can view many more comments in a smaller area. I’m sure you’ve all seen those long comments that are almost essay length. To get an idea of exactly how much this helps, just take a look at the size of the scrollbars for the same number of comments with and without Auntie Akismet!
How to Use it
To view the entire comment, simply click on the [...] link at the end of all truncated comments and a little Javascript alert window will appear with the full text.
There is also a very useful option available with Auntie Akismet. You can choose whether or not to detect certain keywords and label them with red to indicate spam. This is very useful to lower the amount of spam comments you need to read through. Take a look at this screenshot to see what I mean.
There are 10 comments above. Eight are flagged automatically as spam and are displayed in red. The other two weren’t flagged but turned out to be spam anyway. All this information fits in the space of one spam comment if I weren’t using Auntie Akismet! That’s efficiency!
And since it runs as a script on your own browser, you don’t need to add another plug-in to the 50 that you’re already running!
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Very nice tips here for askimet. Although I use askimet but I only check it once and awhile, I’ve never found anything that is NOT spam.
Really? Everytime I check I find at least one or two legitimate comments that get caught.
I am up to 6000 spams ther never stop just keep coming in.
Akismet fails too many times. If it won’t stop I will be forced to install capcha or somewhat on more popular sites
As I mentioned before, Bad Behavior works pretty well for me in reducing the amoung of spam to a manageable amount with Akismet.
Spam Karma 2 kicks Akismet’s ass!
It’s a lot more sophisticated and you don’t need to sign up with a third party in order to get the plugin to work.
http://unknowngenius.com/blog/wordpress/spam-karma/
I’m still afrid real comments will slip into the void and so as sad as it might sound, I still hand moderate all of the comments on all of my blogs. It is indeed time consuming, but all of my good comments definately get through, I have more focus in replying to them, and I am abel to strip the URl out of comments that are useful but obviously from spam marketers.
[...] qualifies as a quality comment, when blogs are exploited, how to spot spamments, how to minimize what’s in your Akismet, etc. The talk is endless when it comes to commenting and the ethics involved on the subject. Here [...]
I also do this manually. I am not getting one good comment for every 5 spam comments or so, but I don’t mind. As long as it is still manageable, I prefer not to use a spam blocking plug-in. It is always frustrating when my comments get lost, so I don’t want to same for others.
Spam is a real problem. I think I
will experience it too once my
http://www.blogadollar.com has taken
off.
GreetingS.
Haha, the comment above this is very hypocritical. Talking about anti-spam while giving off his URL.
Glad you liked Akismet Auntie Spam.
Hi.
Spam has always been a problem. Wish someone could come up with a solution soon.
Thanks for sharing your idea. Most of the comments I receive was spam even there is a capcha image. This really helps a lot.