In the process of cleaning up after the comment spam bomb yesterday, I noticed that my Akismet plugin is a little out of date. I was running 1.15, and the Akismet download page says they now have version 1.21. After downloading and installing, I see it is actually reported as version 1.81. I’ve asked Akismet what the correct most recent version is. Regardless, I’ve upgraded.
The only new option in the Akismet Configuration panel is a checkbox “Automatically discard spam comments on posts older than a month.” That makes sense, I generally allow Akismet tagged messages to disappear after 15 days anyway. Right now there are 3,682 messages waiting to be purged in my queue. Hopefully half a month from now the queue will be mostly empty. I think I’ve only ever had one message that was incorrectly tagged as spam by Akismet. Not bad, out of 14,093 messages.
I do wish that the Manage Akismet spam page was easier to load. It attempts to show all the messages that have been tagged. It usually kills my browser. It would be nice to browse it by post that was commented on. Or by date. Grouped by X number of messages at a time? Or if I could automatically discard certain messages (e.g. if the message contains keywords like viagra, insurance, poker, etc…).