1. Install Akismet – This has to be one of the best plugins. The downside is they’d like you pay if you get a ton of spam. After all, it is the nice thing to do. For the average user though, it’s free.
2. Install Spam Karma – Excellent plugin that can stop a flood of spam comments. It works great and it’s completely free.
3. Install a captcha. It can be as easy as 2+2=? or it could be one of those letter puzzles. Personally I prefer the math ones as long as it’s not something like “What’s 28×5″. Keep it simple as I think 2+8 works just as good.
4. Have some fields required. Make sure that you are requiring Name and Email for any comments. I don’t think it helps much, but it’s better than leaving it wide open.
5. Use the Blacklist – Some words just don’t belong in blog comments. If you think of some ‘adult’ terms you’d like to keep out, just add them to the blacklist. The comments will be immediately deleted. Be careful though, you can’t recover deleted comments.
6. Moderate More – Use WordPress’ moderation area to put more spam into moderation instead of just letting it go live and cleaning it up later. Things like changing the number of links in comments to 1 or 0 can help a lot. Also adding /strong works well as a lot of recent spam contains a few bolded keywords. Analyze your spam to see if you can find a trend.
7. Install Bad Behavior – Bad Behavior is a set of PHP scripts which is suppose to analyze the bots coming in and block the spam ones. I haven’t tried it, but love the idea.
8. Login to Comment – Not my favorite method as I think that if you require a login, you also loose a lot of good comments because people won’t take the time.
9. Login to OpenID to Comment – OpenID is one of the mass ID sites on the internet. One account with them will work across many websites. This is a better option than #8, but I’m still not a “login to comment” fan.
10. Turn Off Comments – If you don’t have them, you won’t get spam. Then again, you also won’t get any good comments and that’s a big part of blogging.

In the end, zero spam comments is not likely. No one can stop a real person from putting in a link to their porn site. But you can help slow down the automated spam quite easily.

What plugins or tips do you have to share?

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Increasingly I have started having problems posting comments on popular blogs such as Problogger. Initially it was when I included a link to a relevant post, which is within Darren’s comment policy. Recently I have had comments that didn’t include a link enter the moderation queue on new posts. Maybe I am going to have to start commenting without entering an optional URL (I know that affects Spam Karma)

It is well known among those that visit Darrens blog on a regular basis that Automattic use Problogger as a yardstick – the site attracts a great deal of spam.

Collective Intelligence

No one outside Automattic know the inner workings of Akismet, but it is known that it collects data from all the blogs using the service, and uses an algorithm to determine if a comment is spam. Such a system can be very effective. If someone spams one blog, they in some way get a black flag on all blogs, although how much weighting is transferred from one blog to another is unknown.

Rogue Data

I know Matt Mullenweg wouldn’t flag criticism on his blog as spam, but that might not be the case of every blogger. The same could be true for trackbacks – instead of just deleting a trackback that was in some way critical, or from a competitor joining in the conversation, it would be easy to flag it as spam.

The Danger of Collective Intelligence

Collective Intelligence isn’t just used for blog comment spam, it is also used for email spam. Every day I pull emails out of my spam folder in gmail. Some of it is highly important, such as data sent to me from this domain, contact form results, spam karma results etc. Often those reports contain "naughty" words – one day Gmail will learn that I really need this information.

I also pull lots of email from marketers out of the spam bin. If I have signed up for the mailing list, it shouldn’t be in the spam bin, even if I might not read it every time. If you don’t take this action, the email filters have no data to work with, or might take it that if you leave the comment in the spam bin, that it made a correct decision.

My Own Commenting

Whilst I am sure there are more active blog commenters than me, I am fairly active, and always try to add value. I am a repeat commenter on many blogs, and 95% appear without any problems, even on sites running Akismet.

Here are some things I have noticed:-

• Links in the Body – If you include a link in the body of a comment, you have a high risk of being flagged for the moderation queue. Even when the owner of the site has asked for a link to be posted, I avoid it.

• Optional Links – In your optional link to your site, that is actively encouraged, if you use it to link not to your root domain, but to highly relevant deep content, it has a higher chance of being flagged as spam.

• Long comments – If you make a longer comment, adding true value to the blog where you are posting it, you are more likely to be flagged as spam. I am not sure if that is because you have a higher chance of snagging a particular word filter, but I am less inclined to write long comments. I write lots of comments on blogs discussing monetization. I avoid using words such as money

• Constructive Criticism – I avoid linking / pinging blogs that are adverse to criticism, or don’t show trackbacks. If a trackback doesn’t show up, it suggests to me that there is a chance my trackback is remaining in the moderation queue, or even worse is being flagged as spam.

A blog which isn’t comment / trackback friendly for me becomes a "bad neighbourhood", in much the same way as linking to a grey boxed website might damage your ranking in search engines, commenting on or linking with a trackback might damage your ability to comment on other sites.

Require Signups to Comment?

No matter how much you think this helps with spam, it deters constructive comments. I have declined commenting on 2 blogs today simply because they required me to sign up to their blog to place a comment.

I have just deleted the broken trackback from one of them after I wrote a long comment, only to discover after I hit submit that I needed to sign up to comment. I didn’t however flag it as spam as many would.

Liability and Reputation Management

Reputation management is often discussed – I frequently get comments from the owners of various products and services I review, whether the post was positive or negative. I always try to be constuctive in my opinions, and even when what I say is critical in some way, generally the time I have spent looking at something in depth is appreciated.

Due to collective intelligence, the actions of a rogue webmaster who flags critical comments and trackbacks as spam, could prevent legitimate commenters voicing their opinion on hundreds of other blogs. Who would ultimately be responsible, Akismet or the webmaster who flagged comments as spam that were just voicing a different opinion?

Who knows, maybe that is why I am having increasing difficulties posting comments on Problogger, and other high traffic blogs using Akismet. I am fairly certain that Darren has never flagged one of my comments as spam, and I have been leaving comments there for some time. Surely Akismet should have learned by now?

Spammers are actively working to improve their Akismet reputation by posting comments containing absolutely no links. If a comment gets approved or slips through, many comment systems would give a significant bonus for any future comments, they would no longer be a first time commenter.

GeoTargeting Blacklists

I am not sure if GeoTargeting is used in some way for blog spam blacklists. I really hope it isn’t. I am based in Poland, maybe that is having an increasing affect on my ability to post comments. Blogging is a global community.

Tips For Akismet Users

Many people who use Akismet as a way to control comment spam believe that it saves them a lot of time. In many cases that is true, but there are certainly an increasing number of posts I have read regarding false positives.

This post isn’t intended to deter people from using Akisment, but to be aware of the effects of collective intelligence and how they can help to improve it.

• Use delete – Don’t flag critical comments and trackbacks as spam – you could always leave them, or answer them in a constructive manner – the latter shows real class

• Monitor your spam frequently – don’t just assume everything Akismet catches is spam – not taking action could be harming your customers ability to give feedback

• Actively recover comments even if they are critical – you can always delete the comments afterwards – I don’t know if comments detected as spam and not recovered affect the collective intelligence, but having briefly looked at the Akismet WP plugin code, white flag signals are being sent.

• Upgrade Akismet – newer versions of Akismet plugins use different functions to check for spam, and sometimes remove functions that were determined to cause too many false positives.

The Automattic guys are constantly working on Akismet to improve it. They rely in part on the data you provide them, both flagging comments as spam, and recovering comments from the sin bin.

Maybe one day I will happily use Akismet, but currently I am uncomfortable by the amount of times my own comments end up in someone’s moderation queue, only to sometimes appear a few hours or days later when a good webmaster does some house keeping. It interrupts the flow of conversation.

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Andy Beard – Niche Marketing – Blog search engine perfomance, WordPress and general niche and affiliate marketing tips

I was upgrading my WordPress Labs Install Module and thus there was no damage done. My test WP install stalled; thus I decided to write this article as a warning to those upgrading to WordPress 2.1.

So, here is a mild reminder when you upgrade your WordPress Install to the Latest Release (they have the Zip version too). This article assumes that you have a 2.0.x version of WordPress already installed; if you’re looking for a new installation or the official WordPress installation guide, please read the WordPress Docs.

WordPress 2.1 is a brand new package complete with more efficient database code, faster than previous versions, more Ajax. It is also bundled with the powerful anti-spam plugin for WordPress – Akismet.

PRE-UPGRADE CHECKLIST

Let us be prepared before we upgrade from WordPress 2.0.x to WordPress 2.1.

1. Back-up your database.

It is an extremely easy task with WordPress DB Backup. I think this was pre-packaged with the release of 2.0.5 or something close to that. However, this is done away with in the latest 2.1 Release. My assumption is that (I think this is what the WordPress team thinks) with the WordPress Export feature, this is no longer needed. However, this old plugin still works and is great even with WP 2.1; I think you should keep it handy.

2. Backup your other WordPress related files (mostly custom edited/added ones).

Personally, I prefer to keep uploads, images and other WordPress non-related files outside of the WordPress installation. This way, I don’t really worry about over-writing files or deleting the same by mistake.

3. De-activate all Plugins.

I think this is where my first upgraded stalled. So, de-activate your plugins.
UPGRADE

Now, the upgrade to WordPress 2.1. Well, you can either do a clean upload or overwrite the WP files. In my case, I did an overwrite.

1. Upload all the new WordPress 2.1 files and overwrite old files except wp-config.php.

2. Now go to your /wp-admin/ folder and you should be asked for an upgrade which usually points to /wp-admin/upgrade.php

That should take care of the upgrade. But we are not done yet, there are few things we should take care of – the Post Upgrade steps.

POST-UPGRADE

1. Activate all plugins. You may like to visit and check the compatible plugin list.

2. Enable “Use the visual editor when writing” in your Profile page. Many bloggers do not use the Visual Editor in the 2.0.x days but with the tabbed Visual-Code view in WordPress 2.1, it is worth the switch.

3., Check if your “Pages” are correct. In my case, all pages got converted into Articles; I had to manually convert them to Pages again.

4. Database Query Caching is built in with WordPress 2.1.

All done, then you check out the new features.

IMPORTANT PLUGINS TO UPGRADE

• If you use the Subscribe to Comments plugins, you should upgrade to the latest release (Subscribe to Comments 2.1) as there is an error message when using the 2.0.8 version of the plugin with WordPress 2.1.
• Upgrade WP-Cache to v 2.0.22.

Disclaimer : The above observations on WordPress 2.1 installation, upgrade are my personal experience and may vary from yours.

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Brajeshwar is an ace digerati and an ardent believer of
KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid), he envisions pushing the technical
envelope time and again for the betterment of commercial and
practical applications.

http://www.brajeshwar.com/

Favorite Plugins

Akismet: Do I really have to say anything? Its already caught almost 70,000 spams for me. I used to spend so much time weeding out spam emails . anyway akismet is the bomb.com

Bookmark Me: To Be honest I am probably going to dump this one in the next shoemoney.com revision (which should take place in the next few weeks). After using crazyegg on my blog for a while I hardly EVER see anyone use anything other then the delicious button so I think I am going to focus more on del.icio.us and my RSS. It is cool though and easy to implement.

Brian’s Threaded Comments – This is by far my favorite fun plugin. Its what lets me respond inline to others comments and also lets visitors do the same. It inspires conversation on your blog almost like a forum. Very Cool.

Comment Karma – This is what lets you vote (digg look alike) on comments. I am not sure if I will keep this plugin going. My original intent was to make it so I could display the most liked commenter ala weblogsinc but Its looking like I might just write my own custom plugin for that but for now this one is letting me know atleast people might like something like that.

Democracy – This is a new plugin that I am really liking. It is a poll plugin that lets you display polls in posts and also in your sidebar. It also has options so you can show archives of polls and archive/increment them. It is also extremely customizable and easy to implement.

Digg This: This plugin is what makes the little digg icons on my site. Basically when someone comes to the url from digg it automatically detects the url and adds the button. This is really nice cause you dont need to keep track when someone diggs your posts.

podPress – This is the BOMB if you are going to do anything with media. even word/pdf files to video you MUST get this plugin if your doing anything with media at all. It also provides easy inclusion and feeds for Itunes.

Favorite Trick – WordPress Title

This post was inspired by First Page Fitness

WordPress Title – there is a function in wordpress it looks like this – wp_title() If you look at your theme you will see it. Its probably there in the title tag and other stuff. What you may not realize is that you can give this function 2 arguments.

wp_title() by itself defaults to wp_title($sep = ‘& raquo;, $display = true)

For non h40rs – the & raquo; is what gives you the >> before each post. That is why you see that so much on every wordpress blog at the begniging of the title is because that is the default. The second part and this is more geekier says to display the page title (true) or return it for use in PHP (false) lets not worry about the second part.

So what fun can we have with this? Well lets say the title of the blog post was “Apple Iphone Is Cool”. Now by default if someone went directly to your post it would look like:

>> Apple iPhone is Cool

If we want nothing infront of the title then we just send a null string like wp_title(“”,”False”) That would make it look like:

Apple iPhone is cool

Basically anything you put in the first set of quotes is going to lead your title. Good luck and have fun..

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Years ago I found myself on unemployment and in debt but with many service oriented websites. Determined never to work for “the man” again over the next several years I learned how to monetize those websites through donation, subscription, direct sales, contextual advertising and affiliate advertising. People say that I have a knack for seeing marketing angles that most people do not. I work hard, party hard, and have a relentless work ethic when something catches my interest.

http://www.shoemoney.com

While Jeremiah’s finding Akismet to be reliable, I’m finding it to be less so. With the number of comments increasing on Marketing Pilgrim, I’m thankful for the spam filtered out by Akismet, but I’m having to spend too much time “de-spamming” false positives.

This was magnified with the Digging of a recent article, resulting in many comments. I found many legitimate comments appearing in Akismet – including some from people who had commented before – and I had to manually de-spam them, often the same person multiple times.

It’s become impossible to simply let Akismet do its thing and trust that it’s not falsely flagging comments as spam.

If anyone knows of a better solution, I’m all ears. In the meantime, here’s what Akismet needs (especially the WordPress plugin).

• Manually enter trusted IPs or email addresses.
• Include my own list of trigger words to prevent spam that still gets past Akismet
• Sort and filter options for viewing flagged spam. Let me sort by email, name, IP etc, so I can find “friendly” comments a lot easier.

So while Marshall is having problems with Gmail – it’s doing fine for me, although 3 of the past 12 emails were spam – and Jeremiah is happy with Akismet, I’m certainly finding it to be straining at the seams.

Anyone else finding an increase in false positives, or more spam getting through? Any other features you’d like to see added? Perhaps you have a better solution for spam than Akismet – I’m all ears.

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Andy Beal is an internet marketing consultant and considered one of the world’s most respected and interactive search engine marketing experts. Andy has worked with many Fortune 1000 companies such as Motorola, CitiFinancial, Lowes, Alaska Air, DeWALT, NBC and Experian.

You can read his internet marketing blog at Marketing Pilgrim and reach him at andy.beal@gmail.com.

Lets think about this a bit – what do we know about Akismet? From everything I have read at the Akismet Website, we know that it weighs a variety of factors in the incoming message to determine whether it is spam or not. Note that this is not blacklist activity; rather the recognition sounds like it is run through a neural net of some sort for heuristic analysis. What factors would they be? Most likely they would include the user name, email address, as well as words and links in the subject and body of the comment.

So, how can this be abused?

Let’s say there is somebody you want to silence on the internet. The first thing you would need is his/her login credentials, such as their typical user name and the email address used. This can easily be retrieved by enticing a user to comment on your own blog.

Now that we have his name, and the email address used to post comments. Consider this scenario:

Lets say we were to start posting comments to other blogs using his credentials. Let’s link to a bunch of prescription drug sites, porn sites, and adultfriendfinder while we’re at it. After posting a certain number of comments like this, would Akismet begin auto-filtering this username and email address as spam?

What if we were to somehow spoof his IP address – what then? Would this be the final nail in his coffin? And how long would you need to keep it up for the identity to get to the point where it is automatically associated with spam? How many legitimate comments would need to be marked not spam’ before this person gets his identity back on the whitelist? If this is a possibility, it presents huge possibilities for abuse.

I would like to hear something from the Akismet team over this – this seems a little too simple, yet I have not seen any evidence that indicates that this is not possible. How about it? Can this be done? Or are the check in place at Akismet good enough to ensure that this won’t happen?

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Did you like this article? Keep up with Brian’s expert search optimization tips and tricks at http://www.caydel.com

They are both produced by Automattic. Recently I sat down with Automattic’s CEO, Toni Schneider, for a 45:33 interview for ScobleShow.

We talk about everything from the future of blogging, to spam detection, to other fun things. If you’re interested in WordPress, you won’t want to miss this one.

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Robert Scoble is the founder of the Scobleizer blog. He works as PodTech.net’s Vice President of Media Development.

Go to Scobleizer …

Their names have been hijacked by blog spammers, according to Akismet which stops spam appearing on my blog.

A tidal wave of comment spam this weekend has been stopped in its tracks by Akismet. Apart from one little recent glitch, Akismet really is an excellent service which learns from the collective feedback of everyone who uses it.

Then there’s trackback spam. Again, loads of it this weekend, mostly from one particular site trying to connect to my post the other day about Microsoft’s RSS feeds directory.

What was interesting about this trackback spam salvo is how Akismet dealt with it. The first three trackbacks were waiting in my comment moderation queue, so not initially seen as spam. A quick look at the site left me in no doubt that this was clearly a splog so I marked them all as spam. That action sent my choices to Akismet to add this info to their database. From that point on, all other trackback requests (more than 20 so far) have been stopped automatically by Akismet.

Originally developed for WordPress, Akismet is also available as a plugin for blogs running Movable Type and on some other platforms. To use it, you need an API key which you can get only by starting a blog on the hosted WordPress.com service (now that’s a smart move).

One nifty plugin I have installed is Akismet Spam Count which lets any visitor here know how many spams Akismet has stopped. No other use, really! It’s in the sidebar on the right under the heading “The War Against Spam.”

Over 1,340 spams stopped dead so far since I started this blog at the end of February. Small beer, though, compared to the second most spammed person in the world with over 270,000 trapped spams.

That certainly puts a lot into perspective.

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Neville Hobson is the author of the popular NevilleHobson.com blog which focuses on business communication and technology.

Neville is currentlly the VP of New Marketing at Crayon. Visit Neville Hobson’s blog: NevilleHobson.com.

If you feel there is something missing, just write or download a plugin. It’s amazing how many plugins are already available. Below, I highlight 7 plugins I’ve used, find helpful, or just think are interesting:

1. Akismet

I’ve been using Akismet from the moment it became available and it’s made life considerably easier. Akismet is a spam management tool. Check that. It is a hassle free spam killer. Akismet now comes bundled in WordPress 2.0.

2. WP On-Demand Database Backup

Coming from the world of dealing with highly sensitive financial data, this plugin is particularly important to me. If you are not backing your database up on a regular basis, you are messing with fire. You need this plugin. It also comes bundled in WordPress 2.0.

3. Google Analytics and Feedburner Reports

My friend and team member (at Silas Partners) is an uber WordPress plugin developer. I recently became aware of his reports plugin, which ties in data from Google Analytics and FeedBurner. Using his plugin, I can check out stats from both of those services via a “Reports” tab within WordPress. That saves me time and that is why it is an awesome plugin. Thanks, Joe.

4. Flickr Photo Album

Joe makes the list twice. This time with his Flickr photo album. While I wouldn’t publish an album (especially not on this blog), what I do like is that this plugin pulls in photos from a Flickr photostream to quickly post to a blog entry.

5. Customizable Post Listings

With this plugin, you can quickly create a WordPress page with any sort of content you want. I previously used it alter the home page of my blog, changing what and how much information was displayed for each post.

6. Jerome’s Keywords

Thanks to Jerome, you can add in Technorati tags to each of your posts rather easily. I previously modified the plugin to work for other services too, although I am no longer using this plugin.

7. Author Limit

One of the fellas who helped me code this great design created a plugin to limit the length of the author name and title for my comments section. Rather long trackbacks were effectively “breaking” the design – he threw together a quick plugin to limit the author length to 33′ characters. Why do I include this plugin? To end with an encouragement that if for some reason WordPress isn’t doing what you want it to, even a couple lines of code from a plugin might solve your issue. And the chances are that if you are wanting a plugin to do something, someone has already written it.

Have any plugins that you think are awesome? Feel free to share them below.

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Ken Yarmosh is a consultant who helps organizations get the most out of their technology investments. He works with technology users and creators across various industries, focusing on technology education and strategy. With over 7 years IT experience, Ken has worked with small businesses, non-profits, federal agencies, and multi-million dollar companies.

His online efforts include acting as the Editor for the Corante Technology Hub and authoring the TECHNOSIGHT blog.

The open source movement provided an opportunity to build a service industry around a freely available product. Firms like Red Hat offered handholding to enterprises who wanted to have someone to yell at should an open source product misbehave.

WordPress creator Matt Mullenweg’s new business, Automattic, offers professional services related to his projects. Om Malik exclusively reported Schneider will serve as Automattic CEO, along with his participation in the new VC company called True Venture.

Automattic described its business on its website:

WordPress has grown dramatically in its acceptance by bloggers, and even figures in the blogging efforts at the New York Times. Other projects include the WordPress.com hosted-blog site, the Akismet spam protection service, and bbPress forum software.

Schneider hinted on his blog that he may do for Yahoo what Doug Edwards is doing for Google with his Xooglers blog, and offer a peek at Yahoo’s inner workings:

—
Email the author here.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.