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Announcement

New Anti-Spam Service

9 June 2014

We’ve implemented a new anti-spam service on sites.cardiff.ac.uk & blogs.cardiff.ac.uk that now utilises Akismet.

What is Akismet?

Akismet is a hosted web service by Automattic.com, the people who make WordPress.com, that saves you time by automatically detecting comment and trackback spam. It’s hosted on Automattic’s servers, but we have access to it through plugins and an API.

Do I need to do anything?

No, we’ve implemented the plugin at the network level so this should have been a seamless transition.

Can I configure Akismet for my blog?

Yes. Akismet has two settings that you can control.

You can find these settings under Dashboard – Settings – Akismet.

If you have Jetpack activated then you’ll find Akismet under Dashboard – Jetpack – Akismet.

akismet-jetpack

Akismet Settings.

Show the number of approved comments beside each comment author.

Turning on this option displays the total comment count of each comment author within the WordPress admin panel.

Silently discard the worst and most pervasive spam so I will never see it.

The Silent Discard feature can improve performance. This feature identifies and blocks the worst spam comments. The Akismet team found that 80% of spam is so bad that it could be flagged as “pervasive”. The silent discard feature causes pervasive spam to bypass the spam folder entirely so that you’ll never see it.

Akismet state “enabling the feature can result in significant reductions in your storage and resource usage requirements”.

When you visit your Akismet settings you’ll see how many days of your life Akismet has saved you as well as some new stats and graphs demonstrating the plugin’s effectiveness. Here’s an example:

akismet-graph

Clicking the ‘Summaries’ link takes you to a page of stats. Here’s an example:

stats-at-a-glance2

You can also add an Akismet widget that will display the number of spam comments over the life of your blog.

Here’s what it looks like when it’s activated on a blog sidebar:

If you have set your Dashboard – Screen Options to display the ‘At a Glance’ widget you will also get the number of spam comments in your spam queue that require attention. It’s important to remember that this is not an automated service, it will require a certain amount of ‘human’ intervention and management.

akismet-glance

Remember not all spam is bad, here’s some spam you may enjoy: Heston’s posh spam fritter.

Many thanks
Web Transformation Team.