I’ve been getting more and more comment spam lately — probably the downside of the growing popularity of my blog (it’s hard to believe, but I’ve had 43 people check my blog’s feed yesterday — forty-three). Yesterday, Matt Mullenweg, main developer of WordPress, announced a solution named Akismet. It is basically a semi-automatic automatic social network; every WordPress user who has it installed as plug-in and who marks comments as spam / not spam automatically contributes.

WordPress.com account required for the API key, so the system is sort of invite-only right now — (update) unless, as Phil points out, you download Flock.so you’re going to have to register there. It’s free.

Eric Meyer has this to say:

[..] It isn’t perfect, but it’s darned close, and it’s been getting better as time has progressed. That’s one of the promised features: the longer it’s used and the more people who use it, the better it gets. [..] Overall, I’ve been pretty happy with Akismet. It has let through less spam than Gatekeeper did in the weeks before I disabled it and all my other anti-spam measures to test out Akismet. [..] [It] seems to be working very well for now.

He also lists some concerns regarding abuse by spammers as well as bloggers’ privacy (since the system has to analyze every comment).