After reading this post by D’Arcy about how easy and free it is to get Akismet up and running for WordPress Multi-User, I finally decided to take the plunge and replace the developmentally languishing Spam Karma 2 with Akismet–I’ll miss you SK2! The setup was easy, and putting the link in the footer (which guarantees us a free educational copy) was dead simple thanks to D’Arcy’s second WordPress plugin (did I ever mention how insanely elated I am to have this guy working in the WPMu realm?). For the last 24 hours Akismet has been running as the only spam filtering system on UMW Blogs (which averages over 60,000 comment spams a month) without a glitch. I have yet to see spam in the sitewide feed for comments, and I have to say I am pretty fired up about this move. For unlike Spam Karma 2, Akismet requires no setup on the part of the user, it works for every blog on the system and just does it’s job quietly behind the scenes. The only thing I need to do now is find a script to go into the UMW Blogs database and delete all the SK2 tables (which are filled with old spam) that have amassed over the last year, anyone already figure this one out?
Either way, thanks for the push D’Arcy, that’s what this community is for.
photo credit: david trattnig
I am a bit nervous about the possibility of false positives – valid comments that get lost in moderation or yanked outright. I’m going to try to keep a close eye on things, but it’ll be hard to know if comments evaporate…
Sounds great! For my part, I’ve been running Mollom on my Drupal sites for about a week and I’ve had no problems, really. If it’s self-reporting statistics are to be believed, Mollom has blocked 107 spam comments for me so far.
One thing I like about it is how well it interfaces with drupal. You can set Mollom to protect just about any form generated by any module, which is nice.
D’Arcy,
I usually find this out from the students and profs themselves, they contact me when something disappears, and I can gauge it that way. Plus, I imagine the incidence rate isn’t too much higher in Akismet as it was in SK2, but SK2 was pretty good for the most part. I’ll be watching closely as well, and sharing out what I find out.
Just go into your database with something like phpMyAdmin; the sk2 tables have clear names to identify for deletion (I would suggest exporting them first paranoid just in case)
Alan,
The only problem with that is that Spam karma was a plugin that each blog installed, so there are thousands of tables. And I would have to seek them out. I actually need some kind of MySQL script that would go into the database and find each set of blog tables that had SK2 installed, and delete just those tables. There are probably over 1500 blogs that had sk2 installed 🙁