Before Akismet was added to WordPress as a default plugin, I manually moderated all comments. Those were the days when I was lucky to get a single comment for any post. After that Akismet took over and it worked fine for a while. I would still go through all the spam comments to check for false positives but at least Akismet ensured that comments from trusted sources (well, most of them anyway) appeared immediately without having to wait for my moderation.

Staring into the face of evil

Well, recently the increasing spam volume has made it impossible for me to check through them for valid comments. I’ve been getting nearly 1000 spam comments a day and I’m very, very certain that some of your comments have been eaten up by Akismet as false positives in the process.

So I have finally implemented an image verification system for commenting. I hate image verification systems, especially since half the time I can’t tell apart a capital “i” from a lower case “L”. But it’s the lesser of the many evils. An e-mail verification system is even more annoying, Akismet eats comments like Cookie Monster eats cookies and a forced registration policy will just turn lazy people like me off.

The good thing is that if you register an account and remain logged in, you won’t have to enter a security code when commenting. Hurray!

Oh well, hopefully this is enough to stop the spamage. Please tell me if you find any bugs with the verification system.