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Greasing the Spam

June 29th, 2007 · by David Bradley >> 8 Comments

Are you running Akismet, the anti-comment-spam plugin for Wordpress? Are you getting several hundred spam comments caught every day? If you are like me, you are probably fed up with scrolling through page after page of them when you review to check no genuine comments got trapped inadvertently.

The Greasemonkey Script, Akismet Auntie Spam for Wordpress, can go part way to making scanning spam comments a whole easier and cut down on all that scrolling. First, it relocates the navigation bar to the bottom of the page instead of the top, which saves you having to jump back to the top to do anything. It also reduces the size of the text and truncates long comments so that more (16 or so instead of 3 or 4 at a time). Finally, you can click a comment to open up the full text in a popup, which makes ambiguous comments easy to check over.

The great thing about the script is that it is not a plugin for your Wordpress installation so it works from your browser across all your blogs. If you install it as part of the Firefox browser running from your USB thumb drive you can also take it with you when you leave your desk.

You need Greasemonkey installed in Firefox and the script itself to get all these advantages, oh, and Firefox and a Wordpress blog, of course.

8 responses so far ↓

  • Hsien Lei // Jun 30, 2007 at 10:44 am

    I never check all my Akismet spam. I rely on chance. If the first page doesn’t have any false positives, I’ll delete it all. If it DOES, then I’ll go on to the next page and only proceed to the 3rd if I find another false positive. It sounds crazy but there’s no way I can go through hundreds of spam every day.

  • rob watts // Jul 2, 2007 at 7:38 am

    Cool, I’ll give this a try, seems like a handy little add on, well spotted David

  • David Bradley // Jul 2, 2007 at 8:27 am

    As I said, if you’re Akismet with Wordpress you can condense your spam comments into a compacted page of single line entries that you can scan much quicker than the page after page of commentspam, but if you get hundreds that still can mean several pages.

    http://engtech.wordpress.com/tools/wordpress/akismet-auntie-spam/

  • Hsien Lei // Jul 2, 2007 at 2:46 pm

    Off topic but it’s the start of a new month and my name has dropped off the Top Commentators list so here I go again. :D

  • Chris // Jul 2, 2007 at 3:26 pm

    Very useful tip for sure – I must admit I don’t like the way Akismet is laid out, I have hit ‘delete’ when I meant ‘despam’ before which is mildly annoying….

    I’ve left a link in my name, to a post I wrote on reducing the spam queue by using a combination of plugins – it’s dropped from 300 to 3 a day in my moderation queue which makes life a lot easier.

  • David Bradley // Jul 2, 2007 at 4:12 pm

    Sorry Hsien, there’d be no incentive once commenters had made the list if it didn’t auto refresh at the start of the month…

    …of course it could be worse, some sites reset Top Comms weekly!

    d

  • David Bradley // Jul 2, 2007 at 4:14 pm

    Chris, one thing I don’t like about WP’s comment moderation system is that when I label a comment as spam that has slipped into the mod queue, I’d rather it notified Akismet and then delete it automatically, rather than my having to then delete it from Akismet’s queue too. Maybe I’m missing something here…

    db

  • David Bradley // Jan 30, 2008 at 5:59 pm

    Why do so many spam comments and emails offer access to cheap but superficially ostentatious wristwatches? They always strike me (no pun intended) as pointless…but then I don’t wear a watch and have no interest in adorning my wrist with something purportedly glamorous, like those giant oysters, which are actually just plain ugly to my eye.

    db

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