I was wandering around the Wordpress admin interface, looking for things to improve, when I happened upon the Akismet stats page. It happily told me that it had caught hundreds of spam comments, along with some amount of ham.
Well, that’s weird, I thought. What the heck is ham? The page explained to me that ham is just normal comments. Oh that’s great, I have comments on my site! Except… I don’t actually have any comments. None of them. The comments page in the admin interface lists 0 comments, and there are near-none on any of my posts or pages.
I went on a hunt for why this is, and found several places describing how Akismet either treats normal comments as spam or eats other comments. Long story short, I removed the plugin from my wordpress install a few days ago to test things out. Lo and behold, a comment appeared on my site a day later.
I can’t say for sure if it was just coincidence or not. In any case, I was not inundated by spam in any way after I removed Akismet, so it doesn’t seem like there was any downside. Just in case, I’ve installed a simple checkbox plugin that I’ve seen work fairly well on other sites. I’ve also got some math captcha plugin that I put in ages ago.
Seems like I should be fine, and I’m getting comments again. Finally, I can realize my dream of getting flayed by blog commenters.