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Writeback_Akismet

I have to confess, one reason why I haven't been blogging as of late (aside from time constraints) is the fact that I've been avoiding going to my own site to deal with all the comment spam. The original writeback plugin for blosxom has no mechanism for filtering comment spam (such as via some sort of CAPTCHA mechanism) so any comment spammer can just leave spam in the writebacks.

It came to a head when, on my last vacation back home to the Philippines, my blog had become inaccessible due to the sheer amount of comment spam that had been left. After manually cleaning up the comment spam, I started contemplating ways to address the comment spam issue. But I never found a possible solution until now.

While searching on google for ways to address the comment spam issue with blosxom blogs, I found the writeback_akismet plugin, which the author has made available via his weblog here:

http://kevin.scaldeferri.com/blog/2006/05/06/WritebackAkismet.html

It appealed to me because the configuration changes required were minimal since it was essentially designed as a replacement for the original writeback plugin. What can I say, I'm lazy and I like to minimize changes. :)

Since I had already gone with the default setup for the original writeback plugin, all I did was replace the writeback plugin with the updated writeback_akismet plugin (renamed to writeback so it would act as a drop-in replacement) and modified the following variable:

my $wordpress_api_key = undef;

Getting the api key was quite simply a process of creating an account at wordpress.com and once the account was successfully created I got my api key.

To test if it was working, I found a post that had some comment spam and tried to manually replicate it in a comment. I was happy to see that the new plugin came back with a message that the comment had been held for moderation. So I can tell that it does do its job of blocking comments that look like spam. :)

Only time will tell how effective it will be in the long term but for now, it looks like it's doing its job and I'm happy. :)

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