.Net Geek: A blog by Aakash Jain

SPAM. Every one hate it and Why not? No one wish to waste his/her time in searching through all messages for a few legitimate messages. I have been receiving lot of SPAM comments before I find an effective way to stop it. (God knows why they were trying to sell Viagra and what not on my blog) To fight it, I have had enabled CAPTCHA for comments on my blog. Enabling the CAPTCHA discouraged SPAM and amount of SPAM goes down significantly, but the genuine posts were also reduced. I believe that visitors don’t want to bear the pain of entering the security words while posting comments. I can understand this because even I feel discouraged leaving comment where someone has enabled CAPTCHA on their blogs. I really wanted to stop SPAM but not at the cost of comments of my dear readers. Other possible way to spam is to blacklist IPs responsible for SPAM messages. However, you just can’t create a list of black listed IPs and keep adding as you encounter the new one. They are very clever and keep changing their IPs frequently.

Finally, I found Akismet is one other good (may be best) service which is helping the bloggers to fight SPAM. "Akismet is an automated spam blocking service which blocks Spam as it learns from its users/community marking SPAM Comments as "SPAM". Luckily, dasBlog (my blog runs on dasBlog engine.) have implemented the Akismet service and can be enabled by entering the API Key under “Configuration” of dasBlog. Anyone, using dasBlog can enable this service as shown in picture below.

It's been two months I am using their service and I am very happy with it. I like them so much (possibly I'm so confident now) that, now I am deleting any SPAM straightaway without moderation. I found Akismet most effective than CAPTCHA and Blacklist IPs. What are you people using?