I’ve just rolled out new and improved antispam software to protect UCalgaryBlogs.ca using the great Akismet spam protection system provided by Automattic (the folks that help develop the WordPress software that runs the rest of UCalgaryBlogs.ca).
What does that mean to you? Hopefully, no spam comments will be posted on your blog(s). And for those people that do comment, they won’t see those silly Captcha challenges (you know the ones – where you’re provided with some squiggly lines that look like they might be letters if you squint just right, and you get to try typing in your guesses a few times until it finally decides you’re a human? Yeah. Those are gone.)
It also means that you’ll have a new link on the Comments section of your blog’s admin interface. When Akismet isn’t 100% sure that a comment is spam, it keeps the comment but pushes it into a waiting area until you moderate it (approve it, or delete it). All pretty easy, and hopefully you won’t even need to worry about that. But every now and then, check out your Comments section to see if there is anything to deal with.
The one visible sign of using Akismet is that the licensing terms require a small “powered by Akismet” notice on each blog, so I wrote a simple plugin that automatically inserts that on all blogs hosted here. If that causes problems for anyone, please let me know (it’s possible that it may interact unpredictably with some themes? it shouldn’t, but there’s always a chance…)
If you think Akismet is acting up, or is flagging comments as spam when they shouldn’t be, or notice that comments are acting up in general, please let me know ASAP (either via email, or using the Support link at the top right of your blog’s admin interface).
The goal is to provide you all with a platform to communicate easily, while filtering out the evil spam roaches that try to take advantage of any open system on the intartubes. If Akismet turns out to not like some of the valid comments here, I’ll turf it and revert to Plan B, and start looking for a Plan C.
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