Removing spam comments

Earlier this week, I was invited to the programme committee of the industrial track of the major academic software engineering conference. I logged into the blog to add the event to the Upcoming Events page. But, surprise, surprise, there was a little red balloon over the Comments sub-panel button, telling me I had 3 comments waiting for approval to appear on the blog. Strange how the comments started right after the move to the new host. The internet is full of mysteries… The Comments sub-panel presents a list of all comments, whether approved (i.e. they appear on the blog) or waiting approval. One comment was gibberish, a sequence of random characters: clearly spam. I removed it and approved the other two by clicking on the appropriate links in front of each comment. But if spamming was to become the norm, going manually through comments would be tedious.

Fortunately, Automattic, the company behind WordPress, also developed Akismet, a spam filtering service, and a plugin for (i.e. an extension to) WordPress in order to use that service. The Akismet plugin, which is part of the WordPress installation but needs to be explicitly activated, automatically marks comments as spam as they are submitted to your blog, and deletes them after 15 days. The spam comments never show up on the blog, keeping it clean. Akismet is not perfect, so you should check manually (e.g. once a week) that all comments marked as spam are indeed spam. If you re-classify them as valid comments, they will be sent to the Akismet service so that it learns to improve its filtering.

These are the steps to start using Akismet on your blog:

1. Go to wordpress.com and click on ‘sign up’.
2. Choose a username and password, give a valid e-mail, and click on ‘Just a username, please’, unless you also want to host a blog on wordpress.com
3. You will receive an e-mail with a link to click, in order to activate your wordpress.com account.
4. Wait a couple of minutes more, and you’ll get a second e-mail confirming that the account was created. The most important is that the e-mail will also contain an API key. Copy it to the clipboard.
5. Log into your blog’s administration panel and go to the Plugins sub-panel. In the list of existing plugins, to the right of the Akismet entry, click ‘Activate’.
6. In the next screen, paste the API key into the text box. Save the changes.

Done! Now continue working on the blog’s content and let the spammers waste their life away…