You might have noticed the last few days that some comments where unrelated and where having links to other web-sites in them. They were put there wuth a spamming purpose. To get a higher rating at Google or to get you to click on the link. I don’t know how I suddenly became a target, I must have been put on a list somewhere ? Luckily WordPress held back most of the spam by not allowing more than 3 links in a comment. It’s very annoying to have to check and delete the comments made in your blog and I started looking for a method to prevent spam.

The easiest method to extend the functionality of WordPress is using plug-ins and I went checking in the plugin repository to see what’s available.

I was a bit overwhelmed by the amount of spam related plugins, and after some reputation checking I went for the Akismet plug-in written by Matthew Mullenweg, yes the same one who wrote WordPress. It’s been running for a day now and didn’t get any spam yet. But it’s to short to really call it a success, if don’t get any spam after a week I will.

The installation was pretty simple, just upload a .php file to the wp-plugin directory on the server and activate it. But there was a twist, I had to sign-up at WordPress.com to get an API key ? This means that there will be people just creating empty blogs at WordPress.com. Mine is at: http://richard5.wordpress.com/ which is a useless waste of resources at WordPress.

While I was busy with this plugin I also uploaded another one to enable links to related entries after every post. It’s just called Related Posts, I hope you like it.