Fight spam on your blog with Akismet

As an author on several blogs, one thing I find myself dealing with on a daily basis is comment spam. It’s not enough for the sludge of the Internet to try to fill my inbox with spam, they want to load my blog with junk too. Fortunately there is Akismet, one of the best spam fighting tools a blog could ever have.

Akismet comes from the same folks at Automattic that bring us WordPress (the platform that this blog runs on, as well as my personal blog) and it also has plugins for several other platforms such as Joomla, Drupal, and Moveable Type. There is also a robust developers community, with several libraries being developed that use Akismet for PHP, Apache, Coldfusion, and others.

Akismet is free for personal use, and can be easily implemented in WordPress by downloading the plugin and activating it. Businesses and other sites running for profit should purchase a subscription to Akismet’s service. Before you can begin using it, you need to obtain an API key from the Akismet site, which is free and only takes a moment. This key helps to identify your blog, which is one of the ways that Akismet stays ahead of the spammers who might try to fool the system into thinking their spam is legitimate. More about that in just a moment. Once you activate the plugin, you are ready to use the service, which actually consults Akismet’s servers for each comment that is left on your blog.

When comments are submitted to your blog, the Akismet plugin analyses them, consults the Akismet servers, and if the comment is identified as spam, it moves the comment to your spam section. The comments remain there so that you can review them if you wish. If you do nothing, Akismet will delete it in 15 days, but if you review a comment and decide that it is not spam, when you click the not spam link, this sends details about the comment to the Akismet servers so that they can learn from your decisions. As more users put the service on their blogs, it gets better and better at identifying what is spam from what is not. Imagine the power behind that, and how much it could add to email spam suppression if they could apply that to email!

I’ve been running Akismet on my blog since its inception, and at the time of this writing, it has protected my blog from 2892 spam comments. That’s over 80% of all submitted comments, and indicates that blog spam is right in line with email spam. If you look at Akismet’s site, you can see they show a running total of all spam blocked, versus ham, which is what they call a false positive. Remember, you can always mark a comment as not spam, which puts it on your blog and helps their service get smarter. Here’s the stats from their site, again, from the time of this writing.

Akismet offers you the option of displaying statistics on your blog, if you want to show off how many comment spams you have fended off, and it also works well with other plugins including CommentLuv, Secure Contact From, and Comment Form QuickTags. If you are a blogger, or maintain a comment system on your company website, you should really check out Akismet. It’s a great tool in the fight against spam.