For the record, my three weeks of regular blogging has brought me over 250 spam comments caught by Akismet. Thank God for this little plugin.

Guests are not allowed to post and I have a plugin to phpbb called “the humanizer” it helps a little when it comes to spam but I am still getting at least 5-6 spam posts a day.

I have found another plugin that uses Akismet, but I haven´t found out how to install it yet

It sounds like if you’re getting so much spam in your forum you should either/both – find a spam filter for your forum solution and/or make login required for posting – no guests. This would really cut down on your spam and would probably make for a better experience for your forum users.

I installed Snap a while ago on both my blog and my discussion forums. Not long after I removed it from my blog, because I thought it was a little annoying and distracting. But I am still using it on my forums.

The reason I am using it on my forums is that almost everybody has a link in their posts and a lot of posts are spam. With Snap it´s easier for visitors to see which sites are interesting to visit and not on my forums and especially it´s easier to find out if the link is going to some viagra site or adult site (but it´s sometimes a little hard to tell because of the Snap window being so little).

Not sure if I will continue using it on my forums, but at the moment I think it´s working ok.

Mark

Thanks Mark. For some reason I’m not willing to throw it completely out. Somewhere it seems like there’s still the possibility of it being useful. But the way it is now, I can’t subject my readers to it. Sounds like you all agree.

Cheers for the article.

Snap Preview is a pretty interesting idea and I don’t want to just throw it out. Yet I can’t really see a solid need for it.

Doug’s idea of selectively using Snap on parts of his site is an interesting one. I could see it potentially having benefit for something like a blogroll.

I guess I’m really on the fence on this one. Perhaps the ‘coolness factor’ of Snap has me. It is a pretty cool plugin. But does cool mean needed or usable? I still say not necessarily.

Function over fashion. Snap seems like fashion to me.

This way, I could utilize Snap on my Blogroll where it may be useful, but not in my content or menu where it can be obstructive. The furthest they’ve gone is to add your own ‘class’; however, that’s really not ideal for a dynamic site.

So… I took it down a couple days after trying it, too.

There are the obvious usability issues that have already been mentioned, but besides that, I just don’t see any usefulness that it offers.

How much can a tiny popup screenshot possibly tell me about the site you are linking to? Instead, we should be practicing good web design by using relevant anchor text in our links that make our users want to click them. I don’t want to see a screenshot of the site you are linking to, I want you to tell me why I should check that site out by following your link.

As far as I’m concerned, Snap Preview is just a useless piece of “blog bling” that I would never consider putting on one of my sites.

I’ll move it to my rather lengthy todo list as well so thanks for the update. Though from a usability standpoint, I still don’t know how I feel about something popping up on the scree without any forewarning. We’ll have to see what I think of the new version.