Hi all! Every novice blogger sooner or later faces the problem of spam, it’s inevitable. Automatic spam bots go around websites and leave comments with links. Removing such spam manually is very labor-intensive, and it doesn’t make sense, because WordPress has many anti-spam tools. Today I will talk about one of them - the Akismet plugin. I also advise you to read the article about.

Akismet plugin: description

So, to avoid unpleasant situations and spend your time profitably, you only need to install one plugin. In addition to it, you can add the Aprove only Russian comments plugin if your blog does not have a foreign audience, but this is not necessary.

A good alternative to Akismet that I know is the WP-SpamFree plugin. You can also install a captcha in the comments (Captcha plugin), but Captcha forces the user to enter security code characters from the picture, which are difficult to see. For this reason, many site visitors will choose to simply not leave a comment, because no one likes captchas.

I recommend Akismet for WordPress not only because it works great and protects your site from spam attacks. The advantage of this plugin is that Akismet itself filters comments, comparing them with those in its database. As a result, all WordPress comment spam is removed and only the actual comments from your readers are published on the site page (although I still prefer to moderate them manually). Akismet does not require entering any captchas and does not interfere with user activity in any way.

Installing and configuring the Akismet plugin

The installation is standard, just find the plugin in the list in the blog admin area. After activation, go to the menu Settings -> Akismet. Next, in the settings panel that opens, you need to enter the Akismet API key, without which the plugin will not be able to work correctly. I would like to say right away that obtaining the Akismet API Key is free and very simple, which is undoubtedly encouraging.

How to activate Akismet - get the key

The sign that appears informs us about the possibility of purchasing Akismet API Key for money or free of charge. Happy owners of their own blogs need to select Personal, and then fill out all the fields. The main thing is to move the slider indicating the cost of the key to zero.

Fill out all the fields and click the button Continue, we have received an individual Akismet API key. Now it’s a small matter: insert the key into the plugin configuration, update the settings and enjoy the absence of spam in the comments of your WordPress blog.

I hope the article was useful, bye everyone!

P.S. Today I wrote my resignation letter! It's time to go on vacation, because soon we are going on a trip to Europe. And who will let me go on vacation if I have only worked for 3 months? I’ll have to quit :) I can’t sit in the office, I wish the blog would start generating additional income, then I’ll be able to travel as much as I want!)

Reading time: 7 min

Akismet is one of the must-have plugins on most blogs. Its purpose is to combat spam in an empirical way (i.e., based on experience): by comparing each new comment with the spam database on its servers, Akismet decides whether to pass it or not. If a comment is considered spam, it automatically ends up in the Spam folder of the same name.

Previously, I already explained how you can fight spam by banning individual IP addresses () and banning an entire rank of IP addresses (). Here we will talk about a slightly different method.

Judging by the statistics of the Akismet service itself, about 10% of comments mistakenly end up in spam. For this reason you have 30 days to pull them out of the Spam folder if the corresponding checkbox is checked in the settings (more on this below).

If this plugin did not come with WordPress by default, then download it from the official repository using the link at the end of the article and install ().

After installing and activating the plugin in the blog admin panel (Plugins -> Installed -> Akismet (activate)), click on the Plugins section again and select Akismet Configuration (Settings):

We have a field where you need to enter a unique API key. You can get it on the Akismet website, and it's free. Click on the link marked with the arrow:

After this we go to the website akismet.com, where we need to do the following:

Select the Personal tariff plan and click on the Sign UP button (click to enlarge the picture):

After this, we need to fill out the 4 fields presented and move the slider to the left so that the amount becomes $0 (i.e. we will not pay anything for using their service):

• First Name - name (any in Latin)
• Last Name - surname (also any in Latin)
• Email is the name of the mailbox where your key will be sent, so enter the one you use
• Confirm Email - repeat the mailbox name

Just below you can select the option to receive a monthly report by email. This is at your discretion. When everything is ready, click the blue Continue button and go to your mailbox, where you received the letter with the API key. At the beginning of the letter they thank you for registering, and then there will be a block of text Your Akismet API key is: ********, where: ****** is your key, which we copy and paste into the field under the red arrow:

Additional options are indicated in green. I advise you to choose automatic deletion, but with displaying the number of comments, decide for yourself. This does not play a fundamental role.

Good afternoon, aspiring bloggers and those who are planning to join them.. I will tell you about a free WordPress anti-spam plugin - Akismet Anti-Spam - it will help you get rid of the routine work of filtering the right commenters from the wrong ones.

The plugin is convenient because it does not force readers to do additional actions if they want to write something under one of your posts - no mathematical problems or captchas will pop up.

Akismet works differently - it looks at each comment, checks whether it contains signs of spam and either skips it or throws it in the spam folder. The analysis is based on statistical data collected from all sites - the reason for the ban may be dangerous links, suspicious texts, names or IP addresses of commentators.

The accuracy of the plugins is very high. It is extremely rare that normal comments end up in spam (in all the several years of blogging, I have not seen even a dozen such cases).

In addition to spam in comments, Akismet can work in symbiosis with (feedback forms) and prevent spam there as well.

In a word, the thing is very convenient and is one of the must-have plugins that I recommend.

Video instructions for installing and configuring Akismet

UPD: After changing the appearance of the site where you need to get the Akismet API key, some people cannot find the free version of the key - look carefully, it is there (I can’t update the picture in the video)!

As you can see, the plugin does not require any special settings, the entire installation of Akismet along with debugging takes only a couple of minutes, but it will save you many hours in the future when administering your WordPress blog.

Flexor 4.9

Updated:

I used to think that anti-spam plugins were needed only for the most popular blogs, but recently, on an almost completely empty blog, one particular post started receiving spam in the comments, not just a dozen spam messages, but one and a half thousand ( ! ) in 3 days. Every spam comment had a lot of links, so WordPress I didn’t miss any of them, but there was no way to sort through this pile of spam manually and I had to install a plugin that I usually immediately remove on a freshly installed blog, namely the most famous antispam plugin.

1 Unpack the archive.

2 Copy the folder to /wp-content/plugins/.

3 Go to the blog admin panel on the "tab" Plugins" and activate the plugin.

The plugin will immediately give you the following message:

When you click on this button you will be redirected to the page " Settings\Akismet", where you will be offered to receive API-key or enter it if you have already received it earlier:

If you do not have an API key, then click on the button " Get an API key", you will be redirected to the page http://akismet.com/wordpress/, where you must click on the large link in the center of the page:

Fill in the fields and click on " Sign up", the following page will open:

To use it for free, you must select a tariff plan " Personal". Click on " Sign up", the following page will open:

By default we are asked to pay $36 per year for using the service, but we have a non-profit blog, so feel free to turn the bar to the number $0 :

The registration form will be reduced to a minimum:

Fill it out and click on " Continue", you will see this message:

After some time (it may take a minute or more), a page will open where your API-key:

The key can be copied directly from this page or copied from the letter received to your email. Now go to " Settings\Akismet" and enter your key in the appropriate field:

Click on " Connect" – plugin activation is complete:

That's it, now the plugin works (received by you API-key can be used on any number of your sites). There are almost no settings in the plugin:

Don't change anything in them - it often makes mistakes, and you can correct its errors manually by looking through the folder " Spam". What may be obvious spam for you may be the most ordinary comment.

Now a little about how it works: when someone leaves a comment on your blog, the plugin sends it to its server for verification. If the server does not consider it spam after testing, then the comment will be published. Otherwise it will be marked as spam.

The creators of the plugin claim that the comment goes through hundreds of tests, but in practice the deciding factor will be the name and link to the website of the commentator. When you mark a comment as spam, it notes in the database on your server that such and such a name, together with such and such a link, was noticed in writing spam comments. When a certain “critical” mass of such comments is reached on all blogs, comments with this name and this link will begin to be marked as spam.

In theory, this looks great: someone marked a comment as spam and now a similar comment from that author will be marked as spam on your blog as well. But in practice, this means that if a dozen bloggers don’t like your comments and mark them as spam, then all your comments will now go to spam on all blogs where . This is bad because most bloggers do not look through the list of spam comments and do not pull out comments that were mistakenly included there.

Frauds are also common when an attacker uses your name and a link to a website, leaving deliberately spam comments on blogs. Sooner or later you will be blacklisted. I don't know how to deal with this. But knowing about this possible development of events, do not be lazy to look through comments on your blog that are marked as spam - it is quite possible that non-spam comments also ended up there.

Gives you the opportunity to show how much spam he has eliminated on the blog. To do this, use the following code:

Or just add a widget:

And then you will get this spam counter:

The appearance of this counter can be easily customized via css-code in a file in the folder " _inc" plugin. But I don’t recommend using this widget - it is an active link to the site, and not every webmaster needs an active external link.

In the latest versions, it keeps a “history” of comments, makes it possible to quickly delete a link to the commentator’s website, highlights links in the comment text, etc. I will not describe these functions of the plugin, since they are obvious to anyone who has installed the plugin.

PS. This is an updated version (July 2014) of the original article from 2008. After 6 years of using the plugin, I want to give you advice - use it in conjunction with any other anti-spam protection! Why? For a trivial reason - without additional protection, you will constantly have thousands of comments on your blog marked as spam.

It does its job of detecting spam very well, but it doesn't stop spam comments from appearing on a blog, it just identifies them. No person in their right mind would look through thousands of spam comments in order to dig out one that was mistakenly included among them. The solution to this problem is additional protection - for example, using captchas in the comment form.

But personally, I’ve been using my own invention on this and other blogs for several years now. Be sure to check it out. In a nutshell, this protection tricks spam scripts and prevents them from writing a spam comment at all. And at the same time it does not interfere with ordinary blog visitors. As a result, it turns out that you won’t have automatic spam on your blog, and few manual spam comments will be caught or