jonlee.ca

Two 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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This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 10th, 2007 at 8:51 pm and is filed under Efficiency. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.