The Playground

Merry Christmas everybody, I hope you all enjoyed the festive season.

Comment and trackback spam have been my biggest nightmare this year. Spam in particular has gone over the top, especially for all my web-based email addresses. For every normal email, I'm getting 6 that are junk mail. Lately it's been the share market emails that are filling up my junk mailbox and it seems to be getting worse by the day.

This morning I decided to clean out the junk comments and trackbacks and was amazed at how many I had. The plugins I have installed are doing a fine job of choosing which among them are junk but I may have to consider an alternative plugin. Akismet works well, but it still processes the junk mail and leaves a copy on the server. A plugin I use on my other sites CCode and TCode from Alogblog's MTy Plugins does the processing before it hits the server, therefore using no system resources, and the junk comments and trackbacks are usually empty so there's nothing to clean up. There's some template tweaking, but it's worth the effort and instructions are easy to implement.