Living With Spam

My hatred for internet spam has reached a whole new level. It has passed hatred. It is now undisguised loathing and contempt for all things spam-related. If there was a way to rid myself of all of those, I will gladly do it.

The reason? Winglica has been attacked by these dreadful spammers. Nothing dangerous, just rampant advertising in the comments area; even inappropriate content for our teen audience.

I had to spend almost an hour just trying to weed out all the spam messages we got. Suffice it to say that once done, our total comments was pruned down to only 1/8 of its original number. A daunting fact, and I congratulate myself in having the patience to go through all of it.

But I should hold off my congratulations. Because the only thing that I could think of to stop these rampant spam all through Winglica was to incorporate WordPress on the entire site. Several site there were used to be run through one admin interface that I created. Installing WordPress and removing my codes I made would be tantamount to starting the site from scratch. The idea alone makes me want to lay down in a corner and give up.

If I stop to think about it, though, there are several advantages to me on using WordPress on Winglica.

• Automatic RSS, Trackbacks and pingbacks – which means free advertising when I don’t have to do anything
• Can be used as a CMS – I’ve already stretched WP on this blog and in Manga Avenue, might as well stretch my knowledge some more
• Automatic archives, pagination, categories and sorting – aha! So I don’t have to get off my lazy butt to code these myself
• Multiple plugins-ready – that means I can add almost any feature I want in the site! O_O
• Amazong spam filtering by Akismet – this little tool in and of itself, the best plugin for WP. You want to know how many spam comments already it caught on this blog? About three times the number of all my pages. Thank you!
• And for me, the far most important reason: I won’t be the one who has to update the script since there are people who are updating WP constantly. I just have to sit back and wait for the next update! Aha! There’s the tipping point. For a lazy bum like me, it’s a god sent. Though the initial incorporation in Winglica will be painstaking, I’ll endure it just so I can be assured of a no spam and secure site.

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