J'accuse Akismet and Fediverse Spammers

Recently every post I wrote got a dozen or more spam messages. As a result of this flood of spam comments Akismet or another app said “You need to pay due to the volume of spam comments. It struck me as tremendously unfair. Most blogs have little to no income, so if spammers target them with comments, and we saturate the limit of blocked spam messages then we’re paying for a nuissance to go away.

My thought, at one point was just to uninstall the spam catcher, due to the rate limit, or even more drastic, turn off comments.

What is interesting about this issue is that it is due to fediverse federation, rather than comments by people on the website itself. If I de-federated the blog, or turned off comments, then that noise would be reduced, but so would visibility.

You’re in a three way situation. Do you turn off comments, given that comments are so rare? Do you de-federate to reduce the problem but become invisible? Do you pay akismet/auttomatic to block spam now that the rate has increased?

In the end the simplest solution is to filter for all unapproved comments, mark them as spam, and then delete them. It takes a few seconds per day but it costs time, rather than money.

Luckily the limit seems to have reset so my comments are protected once again. I don’t want to pay 9 CHF per month for protection from 500 spam comments when you can easily get twenty or more comments per post.

WordPress and Jetpack were great and egalitarian, until they focused on making money. Over decades it went from being an open source project to being death by a thousand add-on payments. For a while jetpack was free, and then it was affordable, and now it has split up all of the products so that you pay one amount for some features, another amount for others. so that in the end it has become “pay to win”, like many games.

When I saw the personal blog exceeded spam messages warning I was tempted to turn off comments, or simply dump WordPress and move on. For a long time WordPress was great, but it has become bloated, and so many features are paywalled that Hugo and similar solutions are more appealing. Each post starts as a Hugo Markdown document, which I then copy and paste into the legacy WordPress blog.