Rich Boakes has written an extension to Akismet that makes deleting all the spam comments much easier. His extension adds a “Worst Offenders” list at the top of the Akismet page. The list is ordered by hits from IP address and helped me delete 2,407 comments with 3 or 4 clicks and saved me scrolling through an endless list of spams.
To make things load faster, look for “LIMIT 150” in akismet.php and change 150 to 10. Your Akismet review page will only display 10 spam comments now, which is more convenient.
Using another mod he wrote he has also hooked Akismet up to Apache’s deny/allow capilibities. It updates his .htaccess to deny requests from the worst offenders on his Akismet page. If your server isn’t particularly powerful this would be a great way of stopping those spammers eating all your precious server resources.
The best anti-comment-spam engine just got a great UI overhaul!
For those who have full control of their servers, there’s also my SpamValve project. SpamValve isn’t WordPress specific (I use it to monitor my sendmail logs, too), but it’s got a WP plugin that ties into the comment API and works just fine alongside Akismet.
SpamValve monitors for repeat offenders and blocks them with firewall rules. And it timestamps everything and automagically unblocks IP numbers which haven’t displayed any activity for a certain period of time.
HALLE-FRIGGING-LUJAH! 🙂
Just knocked off about 30 minutes of work for me every day dropping IP addresses into my htaccess file. 🙂
Thanks,
-drmike