WordPress and Akismet weirdness

I had no intention of starting yet another blog. However, in order to activate the much-needed Akismet antispam feature, I seemingly was forced to sign up for this account.

So it occurs to me — I might as well use it to document my dealings with WordPress and similar software, when I am in the mood to write on such subjects.

Come to think of it, listing the series of steps that led me here is too tedious. Suffice it to say that setup of the Aksimet plug-in is — well, it's weird.

One interesting thing is that I learned deleted old comments aren't really deleted. The "last 15 days of Aksimet spam" on DBMS2.com turned out to include 626 items, almost all of which I'd already deleted, most of which were more than 15 days old.

What's particularly weird is that the system helpfully suggests that since a mass delete can't be undone, I should check all 626 items to make sure I want to delete them — and then doesn't provide any visible way of actually checking more than the first 150 of them. That is, and I use the term advisedly, an interesting design choice.

Another odd design choice, although this may just be a matter of difficulty in coding, is this: There's no way to Mass Edit spam that Akismet missed, and mark it as spam. I currently have 20 spam comments that Aksimet missed on the blog. I can Mass Delete them in one go, or I can tell Akismet about all 20 of them, one after the other. Interesting choice on my part; just how public-minded am I?

Actually, I just went back and deactivated Akismet on DBMS2.com. A pity. I need something like that, and maybe after I find discussion forums on it I'll feel more secure with it and turn it back on, but at the moment it seems just too risky to use exactly where it is most needed — on an active blog getting inundated with comment spam.

But I left it turned on for now on the other three.

Mass Edit still REALLY needs the feature "Mark as Spam"