Akismet – comment spam hell

As I mentioned a couple of days ago I managed to find out what was going on with the WordPress.com api keys.

The big announcement is that Akismet has been released. Akismet is a comment spam blocker for blogs.

Developed by the same team as WordPress, Akismet is a new approach to spam comment detection – and initial impressions are incredibly promising. Akismet learns (much like a lot of junk mail systems) so as new spammers appear, and new spam techniques are tried it evolves to continue catching them.

When a new comment, trackback, or pingback comes to your blog it is submitted to the Akismet web service which runs hundreds of tests on the comment and returns a thumbs up or thumbs down.

For WordPress users like myself it’s incredibly simple to set everything up. Just download and install the Akismet plugin, enter your api key into the interface that appears in the control panel, and you’re set. No mess, no fuss, simplicity itself, much like WordPress really.

In fact the most complicated thing about Akismet is getting an api key in the first place (currently only available by getting a wordpress.com account).

Technically I don’t have a clue how it works and frankly I don’t care. If it removes my comment spam then it can only be a good thing, and from what I’ve seen it’s sweetness and light all around. From what I can tell it’s also running on wp.com (at least I assume it is) and I have received absolutely 0 spam whatsoever on there, unfortunately I get very few visitors as well which might have something to do with it…

Anyway – I’ve ditched all my other anti spam plugins and am now relying on Akismet – fingers crossed.