Movable Type 3.2 brought good news and bad news to comment/trackback spam fighting. Good news…SpamLookup and Junk filter settings. Bad news…no more MT-Blacklist. While SpamLookup did a better job than MT-Blacklist 95% of the time, and it didn’t require any mucking with the MySQL database, it was difficult to train. Spam that it let through always got through unless you manually went into the SpamLookup filter settings and fiddled with the settings. Dealing with that other 5%, especially when you got hit by the same spammer 30x in an hour was a bit of a pain.

Now there’s hope! Akismet is the spam filter commonly available for WordPress blogs and it is very well regarded. Now it’s available for Movable Type blogs too! What it does better than SpamLookup is learn! Like MT-Blacklist used to do, and like my current favorite email spam filter Cloudmark, it relies on a common database to determine what is and is not spam. If you get a spam comment, chances are thousands other did too so why not learn from each other? No futzing with individual white and blacklist settings. Mark a comment that gets through as “Junk” once and similar comments will always be marked junk…for you and everyone else. No more “I saved $32,350 on my car. Isn’t that crazy?” comments clogging your inbox for moderation that are difficult to filter on. One can hope!

The plug-in requires that you get a WordPress API key which means that you have to register a blog on wordpress.com to get the key. Once you have that, and you install the plug-in it should work automatically. I installed it yesterday on this blog to test out, and so far so good. No junk comments in my inbox asking for moderation. I’ll give it a week or so before installing on the other blogs I support.