I’ve written about blog spam quite a bit recently. It’s relentless and I don’t think you can stop it. This morning, I weeded out nearly 200 comment and trackback spams, a weekend’s worth of crap to hit this site.

Luckily, I have the Akismet spam killer about which I’ve commented before. It’s my first line of defence against the spammers as it very effectively stops the spam which never makes it to the published site.

While it does that very well, you still end up with a list of all the stopped spam which Akismet displays in your blog’s admin area (in WordPress) so you can double-check to see that the zapped list doesn’t contain any legitimate comments or trackbacks. If it does, you mark those as not spam which results in them being
published. The system also then notifies Akismet so the false positives don’t occur again.

You could just click the delete button to get rid of all the stuff in the list in one go as it usually is a bit of a pain to trawl through it all. Every time I check, I rarely find a legitimate comment or trackback in there.

But you still need to do it just in case.

So a very neat plug-in for WordPress called the Akismet Worst Offenders Extension just made life a lot easier.

As the screenshot shows, this plug-in flags the identified spam where the same domain or IP address is shown for multiple spams. As developer Richard Boakes says:

[…] What the plugin does is make those worst offenders really obvious, so they can be removed en masse, reducing the ham-hunting to a smaller and more managable task.

It does its job very well indeed. Nice work, Richard.

Incidentally, if you’re wondering, the term “ham” has been around a while but I discovered what it means only recently. Logical, really – if spam=junk then ham=the good stuff. At least, that’s my interpretation.