Why WordPress can’t live without Akismet
Day before yesterday I tried to upgrade the Akismet plugin used by our website; it’s what stops spam from appearing all over the place on the blog.
They’d changed their system a bit, to try to encourage more people to pay for their service (no blaming them). This meant the existing plugin no longer worked, unfortunately. But maybe it was a sign—I decided to try going without it, to see if we could just use the blog as-is.
Not a chance. The spam comments started appearing so quickly, I couldn’t believe it. We’re now giving Akismet $24 for a year’s subscription (they’re open to personal users picking $0, still, but we want them to stay in business, too, or we lose). But it’s already paid off—since I activated it, their plugin has blocked more than 12,000 spam comments. Had I not gotten it going, I’d be manually processing every, single, one, of them.
Screw that.
