An Absolutely Indispensable Tool

If you manage a blog, or multiple blogs, you know what a pain comment spam is. Until last week I had always just viewed it as a necessary evil — dutifully deleting them as they came in — but last week the spam storm hit.

One of the blogs I manage is Emergiblog — a well-known blog in the healthcare space. Last week, a spammer started running through his list of drugs, posting a spam for each in alphabetical order (Ambien, … Valium, Vicodin, Zoloft!). Every time it hit, the author got an email. That’s a whole lot of emails — especially when they’re all spam — so I needed an immediate solution.

My good friend Matt had mentioned Spam Karma to me a while back and recommended it very highly, so I gave it a try.

I do not exaggerate when I say that this may be one of the top 10 most impressive pieces of software I’ve ever used. It’s absolutely amazing.

Imagine if you could have a really smart person look at every single comment posted to your blog and approve or reject it based on whether it was spam. That’s exactly what Spam Karma does.

Now you’re probably thinking, as I did, that there’s absolutely no way someone could teach a computer program to do that…and you would be wrong, just as I was.

I don’t know how it does it, and I’m largely unconcerned. All I know is that I flipped the switch on it (which was eerily easy) and suddenly I had a personal assistant for everyone of my blogs. It’s caught comment spam that I wouldn’t have caught. It’s even smart enough to know to ignore my other built-in settings and just take over comment approval completely.

Absolutely, totally, 100% amazing.

If you don’t have it, and you run a blog, you must get it. Simple as that. It will change forever how you feel about managing your blog. It goes on every one of my blogs from here on out by default.