Akismet Goes Offline

This past week Wordpress Plugin Akismet, a plugin designed to catch most comment spam, went down. The downtime allowed thousands of spam messages to infiltrate onto blogs requiring minutes to hours to delete all of the messages. Most of the wordpress blogging community relies on Akismet to eliminate their spam. According to the Akismet web site, 93% of all messages it catches are spam, which, to me seems like such a staggering number considering the real percentage of spam lies somewhere north of 93%. If you, too, rely on Akismet consider adding alternative comment filters to your blog. Here are some options:

• Spam Karma 2 - One of the older but better filters, this may be your best alternative if Akismet goes down again.
  
• Bad Behavior 2 - Another, pre-akismet plugin, this beaut may not be quite as good as Spam Karma or Akismet but is still a rather solid alternative.
  
• Wordpress Hascash - Among the toughest spam filters available, Hascash sometimes even blocks real comments. Only consider this if no other solutions are available (or if the above 2 options don't work for you).
  

More on comment spam and B-options coming soon.

Tags: blog, blogging, Wordpress, spam, comments, Akismet, plugins