Before Akismet I was spending more time deleting spam
than creating content. Now I can focus on actually blogging!
— Sarah King
Automattic Kismet (Akismet for short) is a collaborative effort to make comment and trackback spam a non-issue and restore innocence to WordPress blogging, so you never have to worry about spam again. Akismet is free for personal use.
How does it work?
When a new comment, trackback, or pingback comes to your site it is submitted to the Akismet web service which runs hundreds of tests on the comment and returns a thumbs up or thumbs down.
Do I have to maintain a blacklist?
Nope! Part of the idea of Akismet is that you're always protected up-to-the-second from the latest dirty tricks of spammers. There's no maintenance, no upgrading, no hassle.
Where does the spam go?
When the plugin catches something as spam it saves it in the database for 15 days in case you want to check it out manually and then automatically deletes it. In the unlikely event something gets incorrectly identified as spam you can correct it and it submits the "false positive" back to Akismet for analysis and improvement of our system. If a spam comment happens to get through and you mark it as spam within WordPress, it does the same thing. Akismet becomes more effective the more you use it.
Non-English comments
Akismet woks well on multi-language comments as well.
Downloading and Installation
- Download Akismet WordPress Plugin and unzip it.
You don't have to do anything to configure Akismet besides entering your API key, just activate and relax. However you do need at least WordPress version 2.0 or above for everything to work. The latest version of the plugin is 2.2.7.
- Upload the plugin file to your WordPress plugins directory inside of wp-content.
- Activate it from the plugins menu inside of WordPress.
- Enter your API key.
- Enjoy the results.
Developers’ website: http://akismet.com/
Video Clip on the plugin installation:
