Akismet brilliantly catches most comment spam and saves it in the Akismet section of our WordPress blogs. But if we don’t check Akismet regularly, we can find ourselves hundreds, if not thousands, of comment spam waiting for review. Since Akismet sometimes mistakenly identifies legitimate comments as spam, we need to pick through the spam garbage to see if any poor sincere commenters have gotten lost in there.

This is a virtually impossible task, since the comments are listed over pages and pages. Often, I just delete all and hope for the best.

Well no more! When I realized that Akismet Auntie Spam is not a WordPress plugin but a Firefox Greasemonkey extension, I was ready to give it a try. (I don’t have anything against plugins – I love them – but I’m worried that too many will slow down my blog.)

Once installed in your Firefox browser, Akismet Auntie Spam detects when you are on the Akismet page in your blog, and organizes all your comments onto one page with only one line of the comment displayed. The comments are ordered according to the number of comments submitted by a computer. So, for example, all comments submitted only once by one computer appear at the top of the screen and are highlighted in yellow. Comments submitted three times and up are highlighted in red, and each comment only appears once.

By using Akismet Auntie Spam, I managed to review and delete almost 500 comments within minutes!

How to install Akisment Auntie Spam:

  1. Make sure you have Firefox.
  2. Install the Firefox Greasemonkey script: go to the Greasemonkey Firefox add-on page and click Install now. Once the script is installed, restart Firefox.
  3. Go to Akismet Auntie Spam, and download the script. Install, and restart Firefox.
  4. Login to your blog, and go to the Akismet page. Watch Auntie Spam get to work reorganizing your spam.
  5. Peruse and delete at will.
  6. More instructions can be found on the Akismet Auntie Spam page.

This extension makes comment spam manageable. Not enjoyable, but manageable.

Managing Spam Maintenance with Akismet Auntie Spam Version 2»