Because the engine run­ning this blog is a home-modified ver­sion of the orig­i­nal release of James Husum’s Fuse­blog and I’m chron­i­cally lazy chron­i­cally over­worked I never both­ered putting any com­ment mod­er­a­tion or spam fil­ter­ing in. Delet­ing the odd spam com­ment was never too big a deal.

How­ever, over the past few weeks it’s got­ten a bit silly. 100-odd mes­sages a day is not a big deal on some sites, but when they have to be man­u­ally deleted it’s kinda annoying.

I toyed with the idea of mov­ing the domain to a Linux account and con­vert­ing to Word­Press, the most awe­some blog engine ever, but then I’d have to write an import script AND a whole stack of redi­rects — refer to my ear­lier com­ment about laziness.

But then I found that an enter­pris­ing chap named Bran­don Harper has writ­ten a CFC for WordPress’s com­ment spam API Ask­ismet. CFAk­ismet took about 10 min­utes to include in my com­ment pro­cess­ing script and it works great. No more phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal ads on this site!

I look after 5 Word­Press blogs and Akismet keeps 99% of spam off all of them — and now it’s keep­ing kay lives here clean as well. It’s the most effec­tive spam solu­tion I’ve ever seen or heard of, short of turn­ing off com­ments com­pletely (that works too).

CFAk­ismet, highly recommended!