Blogs at UMass Amherst

Blogs at UMass Amherst will be unavailable on Friday, November 11, from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. while the Office of Information Technologies (OIT) completes a major upgrade to our blogging software. more…

Over the past several months, the Office of Information Technologies (OIT) has seen a sharp increase in the amount of ‘comment spam,’ random comments promoting commercial products and services, posted to our Blogs at UMass Amherst service.  This spam distracts from legitimate discussions on blogs and places a burden on our servers.

To address this problem, we have installed new anti-spam software, Akismet, and disabled our old anti-spam software, ReCaptcha.

Below are a few things to know about the new software:

• Akismet filters out most comment spam before it reaches our server. You may still see a small amount of comment spam on your blog.

• You do not need to activate Akismet. All blogs come with this software enabled automatically.

• All comment spam filtering happens behind-the-scenes. Your blog’s readers will no longer need to read and enter distorted text before making a comment.

If you have any questions, please contact the OIT Help Desk at 413-545-9400.

The Office of Information Technologies (OIT) has resolved the problems that were causing Blogs at UMass Amherst outages earlier this week. Please contact the OIT Help Desk to report any problems with this service.