Akismet, which is short for Automattic Kismet, is a plugin that checks any incoming comments, pingbacks or trackbacks to your site against its web service to see if it looks like spam or not. It was developed by Matt Mullenweg and “his merry band of Automattic rascal hackers”. The plugin uses some complex algorithms for detecting spam which means you do not have to maintain a blacklist.

At the time of writing this article, WordPress users ranked Akismet with 4 out of 5 stars. This plugin was last updated in December 2008 to version 2.2.3, and it has been downloaded 999,072 times! This download number keeps on growing every day.

I should point out that the plugin is free for personal use, but if your site is making $500 or more, or your site is for a large company then there is a fee for its use.

By using this plugin you will reduce or may even eliminate spam on your website. Akismet prevents spammers from actually placing their links and/or advertising on your blog. This is done by placing any spam it encounters in the Akismet spam queue to await moderation. You can access this spam queue from the WordPress dashboard. Once a comment is in the spam queue, you can perform the following actions:

• Delete the comment because it actually is spam. You will find that you’ll be performing this action most of the time for the comments in the spam queue since Akismet does a pretty good job of detecting spam.
• Approve the comment because it was incorrectly detected as spam. This is also known as a false positive. When you approve these comments, Akismet is notified, which in turns helps them improve their software by learning from these mistakes.

If a spam comment happens to get past Akismet’s web service, (known as missed spam) you can mark it as spam on your moderation screen. Going forward, Akismet will automatically detect any incoming comments from that source as spam. This is a nice time saving feature for sure! So far, we haven’t had any missed spam.

Trish and I advocate that you manage your site properly, and this includes moderating comments and deleting spam. Spammers hope for the possibility that you’re not managing your site properly, which allows them to get their links or ads placed on your site. Therefore we highly recommend that you install this plugin onto your website, otherwise you could be spending more time regulating spam comments than doing actual blogging!

In order to have Akismet working on your WordPress blog, just follow these easy steps.

1. If you are using WordPress as your blog site, skip down to step 4 where you can activate the plugin. Akismet is 1 of 2 plugins that comes automatically with WordPress, so you don’t have to worry about downloading it. The other plugin that comes with WordPress is Hello Dolly.
2. Download the plugin from the Akismet website and unzip it.
3. Upload the plugin file in the usual manner to your site.
4. Activate the plugin. In order to do this, you need to obtain an API Key by registering with WordPress.com. The API Key “allows you to use services and enhancements built on the WordPress.com platform. This allows you to leverage the power of WP.com while still hosting your blog elsewhere.”
5. Enter your API Key when you are prompted to do so. This completes the activation of Akismet.

Now you’re in business. However, there are several things you should monitor:

• Spam queue – you can access the spam queue from your WordPress dashboard. As you recall, this is where you can delete or approve comments that Akismet has detected as spam.
• Count of spams detected to date – of interest to Trish and I, is a statistic on the dashboard showing how many spam comments Akismet has “saved” us from. Depending on your version of WordPress you may see a comment like this: “Akismet has protected your site from 224 spam comments already, but there’s nothing in your spam queue at the moment.”
• Akismet Stats – another great feature of this plugin is the statistics available through the dashboard. The first thing that I love about the page that comes up is the sense of humour. You’ll just have to load it and check it out for yourself to get a good chuckle. However, some of the more useful things the stats page provides are graphical representations of Spam, Ham, Missed Spam and False Positives. Now you’re asking “What the heck is Ham“? It’s the counter part to spam, i.e. it’s all the legitimate comments you receive. One other graph you get is the Yummy Pie which showing the percentage of Spams vs. Hams on your site.

Akismet has to be one of the easiest, most valuable and straight forward plugins Trish and I have come across so far. Needless to say, it’s working great for us! Its value is unquantifiable and the Akismet developers are truly community contributors for providing this service.

Happy ‘spam eliminating’ with this Plugin!

Cheers