David at Blogging Pro has a piece on why b5media has decided to buy an Akismet license.
In short – with 125 active blogs the load of comment spam is massive and we were finding that other tools were just not killing enough of it.
Here at ProBlogger I’ve been using the Spam Karma plugin for the last few months and have found it killed most of my comment spam but for some reason it became incompatible with some other aspect of my blog in the last few weeks and caused some issues with my commenting system (many of you noticed that comments didn’t seem to be getting through – or went through twice). I was also not getting any notifications of comments.
I then disabled Spam Karma and the problems were fixed with my commenting but the spam flooded in. I never realized how much spam I get – it was coming in at around 6 spam comments per minute!.
As a result I’ve been using Bad Behavior this week which has killed over three quarters of my comment spam but is still letting through a comment every couple of minutes (they all are being moderated at this point – hence a lot of your comments are being moderated too at the moment).
With this afternoon’s upgrade to WP 2 I’m going to be able to use Akismet for the first time with the b5 license. I’m really looking forward to seeing how it works and will give a report after a day or two.
Update: Thanks to some wonderful help from Rachel and Regan at Cre8d Design the update seems to be completed. There were a few hitches along the way in terms of plugin compatability and a couple of odd things happen but thanks to Rachel and Regan the new version of WP is working well and spam is under control – Akismet is doing it’s job very nicely so far.
My next task is to try to speed up my loading time a little as I’ve had a few people telling me that it’s crawling at the moment. I’ve made a few tweaks and have improved things a bit but think I have a few external scripts running that are causing some issues so will attempt to work on them in the coming day or two.
Thanks for everyone who emailed to let me know of issues that they saw during the update – hopefully we’ve found all the bugs.
