Akismet: Protecting your comments from spam
One of WordPress's most popular plugins protects your comments against spam. Once installed and activated, every new comment or trackback is first sent to Akismet to be checked against a dynamic blacklist on their servers. Those comments detected as spam are hidden from your blog and placed in a spam bin.
Although intended for use by WordPress.com, the commercial blog-hosting wing of WordPress, it is also available on the self-hosted WordPress.org software.
Akismet has already been installed by default, but we must also activate it then set it up.
From the Dashboard, click "Plugins" from the controls.
You'll be taken to the "Plugins" page, where Akismet will be listed.
Below "Akismet", click "Activate".
The plugin is now activated, but as mentioned in lesson 19, some plugins need extra configuration. You'll now see Akismet is asking for a "WordPress.com API key" for it to work.(Of course, if using WordPress.com rather than self-hosted software, you're done!)
Above the "Plugin activated" confirmation message, click "enter your WordPress.com API key".
It used to be a hassle to get this, even if you did already have a WordPress.com account. You'd need to login there, go to its Global Dashboard and then find the link that takes you to the special key. First-timers always found it difficult to locate. Recently this process has been made easier.
Go to http://akismet.com/get/ in your browser. You're probably running a blog that doesn't generate profit, so scroll down to below the three paid options to choose to recieve a free API key, or go directly to https://akismet.com/signup/#free-api-key
You will be asked to enter you email address, if you have a WordPress.com account, enter the email address you used to register.
If you do not have an account, you'll be asked to choose a username for WordPress.com - you'll be sent a confirmation email and an API key
If you do have an account and you haven't requested your key before, you'll be given one. If you have requested one and have lost it, you'll be sent an email so you can retrieve it.
Now that you have your API key, return to the Akismet configuration page in your WordPress Dashboard. If you have closed it, go back to your Dashboard, and you'll see the link to it at the top of every page, something that won't go away until you enter your API key or disactivate the plugin.
Simply insert the string of digits and numbers into the text box, select to discard spam comments on old posts and click "Update Options". Discarding spam comments on older posts means those detected as spam don't make their way into the spam bin for you to check, lowering the amount of work you need to do if worried about false positives - non-spam comments that look like spam.
You are now protected!
