I wanted to follow up on my previous post about dealing with blog spam.
I installed Akismet and it has worked flawlessly. It has caught dozens of blog spam posts so far. I have had no false positives and no false negatives yet (i.e. it has correctly identified every comment). The only downside is that for it to be really helpful you have to have 100% confidence in it. You don’t want to have to check the “Akismet Spam” list every day.
I guess the unfortunate thing about computers being so great at automated tasks is that a true test of whether or not a post is from a Human or a Computer is really hard. I had previously thought of things like JavaScript challenges and the like to try and stop auto-spammers, but the more I think about it, the more I think that doesn’t make sense. In the end, the requirement is not whether the comment was automated by a computer or entered by a human, the test is whether or not the comment is Spam.
So, give Akismet a try if you don’t want to deal with comment spam all the time. I think you’ll be impressed by how well it works.
What would Turing think of all this?
