Here’s a tip on how to spend less time managing WordPress, through a plugin called Akismet that I talked about a little while back.
Akismet is like having really good spam filtering on your email, except that it filters comments on your WordPress blog. Comments that Akismet thinks are spam are put into a folder for your review, and if you want to make the process completely automatic, you can have it delete comments marked as spam either automatically, or after they spend a month languishing in the spam folder.
That saves you time twice over. Firstly and most importantly, you don’t get distracted by emails promising exciting discussion, when it’s really just some computer-produced junk telling you to BUY V1AGR4 RIGHT NOW!!! Getting distracted from what you’re doing by good email is bad enough, but when it’s because of junk? Really bad. Second of all, Akismet saves you the time of having to mark bad comments as spam and delete them via the administration panel, which is tedious.
So Akismet is one way (and for my money the simplest and most painless way) that you can manage comments on your site, and cut down on the amount of time you need to spend dealing with them. Because you’ve got important ass-kicking to do, after all.
I’ve put together a video that shows the process of configuring Akismet. Don’t let the length of the video put you off – it’s a small number of steps to get the plugin working. I’ve just taken regular pitstops to explain what’s going on through the process.
Feedback more than appreciated. Let me know if you find it useful, and if not, if there’s anything you’d suggest changing.