WordPress® All-in-One For Dummies®

Tackling Spam with Akismet

It's our humble opinion that Akismet is the mother of all plugins and that no WordPress blog is complete without a fully activated version of Akismet running in it.

Apparently, WordPress agrees because the plugin is packaged in every WordPress software release beginning with version 2.0. Akismet was created by the folks at Automattic, the same folks who brought you the WordPress.com-hosted version.

Akismet is the answer to combating comment and trackback spam. Matt Mullenweg of Automattic says Akismet is a “collaborative effort to make comment and trackback spam a non-issue and restore innocence to blogging, so you never have to worry about spam again” (from the Akismet Web site at http://akismet.com).

Lisa has been blogging since 2002. She started blogging with the Movable Type blogging platform and moved to WordPress in 2003. While blogging became more and more popular, comment and trackback spam became more and more of a nuisance. One morning in 2004, she found that 2,300 pieces of disgusting comment spam had been published to her blog. Something had to be done! The folks at Automattic did a fine thing with Akismet. Since the emergence of Akismet, she's barely had to think about comment or trackback spam except for the few times a month she checks her Akismet spam queue.

We cover the use of plugins in Book VII. However, this chapter wouldn't be complete if we didn't show you how to activate and use the Akismet plugin on your site. Book VII covers the ...