Two thousand spam comments caught by the Akismet spam filter since we started using it on CharityBlog 3 months ago. That’s an average of around 20 a day. If any real comments got trapped by mistake, apologies, but we do review the whole *** lot.

James Davis, who runs the FreeCharity hosting service, mainly around WordPress (which is also the software usd here), has produced a petitions plug-in. A demo should appear below.

This will enable collecting ’signatures’ by verifying the email address given (which can only be used once). Quite simple to set up. I’m just wondering how long it will be before spammers start hitting it - they seem to like filling in any online form they find.

More on the WordPress plug-in.

Update: Sample Petition trial now deactivated (took 3 weeks before spam began).