This blog uses Akismet to fight nonsense posts. It is a very popular free plugin. All you need is a Wordpress.com API to activate your protection. Akismet checks your comments to see if they are spam and then it decides what to do with them. To Post or not to Post.

The odd thing is that I have had to manually approve some legitimate comments that were relevant to the discussion. I don’t know what caused them to be marked as spam but I’ve noticed more of it happening recently. It makes me wonder how many have slipped through.

So how does Akismet work? I checked on Google and it told me the FAQS were a good place to start. Google make me feel small.

When a new comment, trackback, or pingback comes to your blog it is submitted to the Akismet web service which runs hundreds of tests on the comment and returns a thumbs up or thumbs down.

And if a regular comment gets marked as SPAM, you just have to mark it as NOT SPAM. Pretty simple.

In other news, I’ve shut off the moderation of comments. Akismet recommends you to use the moderation queue. This doesn’t sit well with me. I see a lot of other blogs where my comment is posted instantly, even if it is the first.

One of the issues with WordPress is that it can sometimes be really hard to fight the right plugin to do the right job. There are many duplicate plugins. And comment plugins are in especially high volume. I’m not talking about SPAM related, just a lot of the different things that many bloggers want on their comment board. Dofollows, anti-spam, top commentators among others are in large demand and it isn’t always clear which plugins are the top contenders.