Friends Who Care

As the owner of several WordPress blogs I am very familiar with blog spam comments. However I was not prepared for what happened yesterday when I deactivated the free Akismet plugin on 1 of my blogs.

In less than 24 hours I received more than 1,000 spam comments on that 1 blog!

That’s right. More than 1,000 spam comments in less than 24 hours. That’s like 50 times the number I expected.

Here’s what happened.

Around 9 a.m. Wednesday morning I deactivated all the plugins on 1 of my WordPress blogs because I am preparing to move it from 1 hosting service to another. And because I’ve learned from a previous blog move that plugins don’t always move properly I deactivated the 32 plugins I was using. Normally Akismet catches anywhere from 3 to 20 spam comments daily on that 2 and a half year old blog. I was prepared for a few spam comments to be awaiting moderation while the blog remained active on the old host for the few days it took me to get everything in place on the new host.

Thursday morning when I picked up my email around 7 a.m. I discovered I didn’t have the 20 or less spam comments I had expected. No, I had 1068!

I have no clue how this could happen. I can only guess that the software used by some spam commenters is sophisticated enough to know when blog comments are totally unprotected. And having an unprotected blog meant 1048 more spammers attacked my blog.

I reactivated the plugin immediately and on Friday morning I only had 14 spam comments in the Akismet spam comment list.

While I know Akismet is not perfect as I mentioned in my article “WordPress Akismet Plugin Doesn’t Catch All Blog Spam Comments”, it’s a lot better than nothing. And while it isn’t the only popular, free spam comment blocker, it’s the one automatically included in the WordPress blog software download.

I didn’t mean to test the power of the Akismet plugin. However getting 1068 spam comments without it versus getting 14 spam comments with it makes the decision of using a spam comment blocker like the Akismet plugin a no brainer.

To Your Success,
Susan

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• Are U Fooled by This Spam Technique? (itauditsecurity.wordpress.com)
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