The how and why of Akismet

The 9th in the series of…

20 Secret Blogging Tips in 20 Days!

It’s like building a Pyramid (one block of rock at a time). Check out the bottom of this post to see the rest.

Akismet

He was an ancient Egyptian God that protected the Pharaohs from Sumerian Spammers.
(ok, I totally just made that up)

From the Akismet people themselves: Akismet is a contraction of Automattic Kismet. Our favorite definition of kismet is “Kismet (principle), the magnetic attractive force that actualizes the playing out of karma; often used in the positive sense.” (but I like my story better)

Seriously, Akismet is a service from the makers of WordPress. It’s built to reduce the spam you may get in the way of comments. I LOVE comments and highly encourage you to leave one but…

I also H8 $pam C0mm3nts!!!

The funny thing is, you’ve seen bad spam comments misspelled like that. Spam comments that look like that are easy to spot. There’s also seemingly innocent, yet slightly off, comments that leave you scratching your head sometimes.

Here’s a real spam comment in that style

It seems innocent enough right? So why did I mark it as Spam? Check out the details of who left it. They are a definite spammer looking for a link back to their spam site.

I’m pretty careful who I let leave links on my blog. You should be too. If my site links to crappy websites (especially blacklisted sites) my Google ranking will fall. That’s why you should have Akismet enabled on your site right now.

What is Akismet? (from the Akismet site)

Akismet is a hosted web service that saves you time by automatically detecting comment and trackback spam.

I’ll explain the magic of how it works but first let me show you it in action.

To use Akismet on your own site just add the plugin, get an API key (it’s just a quick link to do so), enter the key and you are now up and running.

How does it work? (from the Akismet site)

Each time a new comment, trackback, or pingback is added to your site it’s submitted to the Akismet web service which runs hundreds of tests on the comment and returns a thumbs up or thumbs down. As a result, you don’t have to waste your time sorting through and deleting spammy comments from your blog.

How does it really work (in plain english)?

Everyone who has Akismet on their site and marks a comment as spam, also signals the database at Akismet. It tells the database who left the comment, what their email was, the website they entered and their IP address. Akismet tracks all this and if enough people mark a comment, an IP, or a website as spam the Akismet algorithm kicks in and starts blocking it automagically!

So when I mark a comment as spam I’m actually working for you! You can ‘beer me’ later.

Bonus: Don’t have a wordpress site but you would love to have Akismet? Here is a few of the ways developers have adapted it to other platforms. Have a Drupal site – here’s your Module (plugin) https://drupal.org/project/antispam

Ready for a killer wordpress website? Click HERE. Read the rest of the series…
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Mike Mueller

A former professional hand model, Mike now builds Custom WordPress Blogs that rock!

He's an avid hockey fan, rides a mountain bike, a few motorcycles (he had a really fast one,bought a cool orange one, and still rides a really slow one), he loves strong beer and good red wine.