TechLifeWeb

Many people who run WordPress blogs, including this one, use the Akismet plugin to help fight comment spam. On this blog alone, Akismet has stopped 15,666 spam comments! Today, something went wrong. I’m still not completely sure what caused the break down but spam began getting through the net. The first thing to do in these cases is Google it. That isn’t always fast enough in the case of real time problems so the next best thing is TwitterSearch. Actually, in this case, it is the first best thing because as I monitored results coming in over a twitter search on the term Akismet, I spotted someone who tweeted a solution.

Jill Olkoski of Aldebaran Website Design posted an easy solution to the problem. She noted that the when going to moderate the spam it was consistently coming from certain IP addresses. The addresses are from somewhere in Amsterdam.

The fix*:

• Go into your the Dashboard on your Wordpress blog.
• Click Settings (on the top right-hand side)
• Click Discussion
• Scroll all the way down to the section that says Comment Blacklist
• Paste in the following IP addresses:

• 94.102.60.150
• 94.102.60.151
• 94.102.60.152
• 94.102.60.153

Scroll all the way down to the bottom and click the Save Changes button

*This is not perfect. If the spammers move around and change IP addresses  they won’t be blocked by this list. Fortunately it is easy to add or change addresses in your WP settings so for now it gives us a way to fight back.

Thanks Twitter!