If you use WordPress to run a website and you allow people to leave comments then you will know what a pain in the arse comment spam is. Waking up in the morning to two or three hundred unwanted messages is enough to almost turn you to drink especially when spam comment after spam comment is full of a couple of hundred links to videos and pictures of people purporting to put just about any object you can imagine into every human orifice you know about – and sometimes ones you don’t. And the problem, of course, is that hidden in that morass of spam ads for penis enhancers and nipple polishers are a few that are genuine and that you want to publish and respond to.

Which is why, some time ago now, the Automattic team, the same people who develop WordPress, launched Akismet, a service – free to non-commercial users – and a WordPress plugin that does a pretty good job at identifying spam and helping you remove it. Note the distinction there; not get rid of it but help you remove it. The back-end service, to which each comment is presented to receive judgement and sentencing, is pretty good at learning what is and is not spam and marking your inbound comments accordingly. The plugin at the front-end, however, is pretty damn useless. I note, though, that this may be a minority view as most users seem to give it nothing but praise.

The problem, of course, is that the back-end is not perfect and false positives do occur. I get them regularly so I still end up ploughing my way through hundreds of junk comments every week to isolate the gold nuggets from the silt. Which is exactly what I would be doing if I did not have Akismet installed. So the question becomes – what benefit is there in using the Akismet plugin? And my answer to that is, well, none really. But it would take very little to make me change my mind. All it needs are a few simple options.

The vast majority of comment spam that I receive these days consists of endless lists and links, often a hundred or more. An option that says simply, “if the comment includes X number of external links then by all means check it out but please don’t bother showing it to me – just get rid of the bloody thing” would probably remove a good 75% right there. Maybe even more. An option that says “if you find any of these words in the comment text then blow it away” could account for a few more. All I am talking about here is pruning down the daily bombardment to a smaller, more manageable amount so that I can trawl a smaller list looking for the odd one that was misdiagnosed.

It’s the same model as I, and I suspect most people, use to deal with junk mail through the post. The morning mail arrives on the doormat. You scan it all and it generally falls into three categories. The genuine mail, the stuff that looks like junk but might not be and the pure junk. And surely nobody spends time with the pure junk. Mine goes straight into the recycling bin unopened.

It would be nice if Akismet could do the same for my daily dose of unwanted comments.