Everyone who’s been blogging for a while that uses WordPress has heard of Akismet. It’s an amazing WordPress plugin that most of us can’t live without. Actually if it wasn’t for Akismet I suspect I would have turned off commenting on this blog long ago!

For those of your who aren’t familiar with Akismet, it’s a WordPress plugin that will filter comments posted on your blog, much like spam filters work for email. Although it might might not appear as though most blogs gets “comment spam”, the numbers are incredible. Each day I get anywhere between hundreds to thousands of spam comments that Akismet filters behind the scenes so that you don’t have to see them. If I was to do this manually it would take me anywhere from an hour to several hours each day.

What I’ve noticed though is that over the last year I’ve stopped manually going through the comments Akismet has flagged as spam comments. I just automatically delete every comment Akismet flags as spam. And that’s for a few really good reasons:

• I’ve found Akismet to be highly effective at figuring out which comments are spam and which ones aren’t.
• I don’t have several hours to filter out comment spam on my blog each day.
• Losing the odd comment is not as critical as it is for my corporate website. I hate it, but the cost-to-benefit equation highly favors the odd lost comment.

What do you do? Take the poll:

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