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Please leave a comment to test the new plugin.

If you are unable to leave a comment, please Tweet @GrowMap or use this contact info or leave a comment in the latest GrowMap blog post.

As soon as we know it plays nicely with other plugins and hasn’t caused any technical problems we will have others test it and then make it publicly available.

Most bloggers who use WordPress have generally used the Akismet anti-spam plugin since we started. Unfortunately, Akismet flags regular commentators as spammers so often that we have disabled it in all of our blogs.

That has led to being inundated with spam that is now hitting 1,000+ a day in GrowMap and hundreds a day in some of our other blogs. As soon as you manage to get any kind of visibility for a blog you WILL end up with vastly more spam.

Phil Hollows, the brains behind the Feedburner alternative FeedBlitz had a sharp idea for a way to blog spam bots and Andy Bailey from CommentLuv jumped in and wrote a new anti-spam plugin. Having tested the Bad Behavior plugin which behaved extremely badly – locking us all out of GrowMap

Just removing it was not enough – it had to be deleted via ftp and then many files manually edited. Thank goodness for WordPress experts Sammy Russo of Search Friendly Web Design who fixed it (Sammy installed GrowMap).

Special thanks to these others who offered their expertise: – they are people worth knowing:

• Blogging Expert who continually gives of his experience @BloggingJunkie
• Donna Fontenot aka DazzlinDonna who teachs how to make money blogging and offers eBusiness coaching.
• Derek Semmler who installed this and our other JV blogs. Any time you need WordPress consulting consider Derek.

Recovery was  difficult enough that I realized we should NOT be testing new plugins in active blogs. They should first be tested in development test sites, then on blogs that are new like this one, and only then in your primary blog.

Please comment here and let us know so that we can ensure this plugin works and make it available to others. It is time we quit losing so much time to spammers.

If you are unable to leave a comment, please Tweet @GrowMap or use this contact info or leave a comment in the latest GrowMap blog post.

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UPDATE 9/10/10 Comments will no longer go live unless you already have one approved in this blog with the same name, email and URL. I had to check the box under discussions that you must already have one comment approved to keep the real spam off the site.

Enter your comments here to see if they are filtered out by Akismet, end up in spam or are deleted.

This blog is using Akismet 2.2.7 (not the latest version).

Go to the Akismet Test Page at GrokHorses to test in a blog using Akismet 2.2.9.

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• Akismet Thinks We Are All Spammers (growmap.com)
• Akismet Configuration: How to Turn Off Akismet Automatic Comment Deletion (growmap.com)
• TWTPoll: SI Captcha Anti-Spam WP Plugin (growmap.com)
• Why I Recommend BloggerLuv, CommentLuv, SBC (growmap.com)

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