Stop comment spam with Akismet
If you’ve been using WordPress for some time, you’ve probably noticed comment spam — comments that sound really nice, but have really been setup to link back to their business when/if you accidentally approve the comment. The more popular your blog/website, the more you’ll likely receive. One of the best solutions for combating this is Akismet which is provided by Auttomatic, the same people who run WordPress.com. They have setup the service free for personal and non-business blogs. Once activated on your site, whenever someone comments on your site, it will send that comment to their servers to be reviewed. Because Akismet monitors millions of websites, their engines have a pretty good idea if that comment is likely spam or legitimate. If it shows up as spam, they’ll do the hard work and delete the comment for you, only leaving up to you to approve or trash the human entered comments.
While there are many ways to use Akismet outside of WordPress, by far the most popular way is the WordPress plugin. You can see if it’s installed in your WordPress if you click on Plugins -> Installed Plugins in your WordPress Dashboard. If it is, skip to step 2.
- Download and Install the Akismet WordPress Plugin.
- Under Plugins -> Installed Plugins, click “Activate” under settings
- Under the Akismet plugin settings will be a link to the Akismet signup page, go there and create an account
- Once you’ve verified your account, you will receive an API key
- Enter this API key in your Akismet Plugin settings.
If this was successful, you should now see a green bar in the Akismet Plugin settings that says “This key is valid”. You’re now protected by Akismet! If you have any questions, don’t hestiate to ask in the comments section below.