Akismet is a bloggers best friend
Akismet.
It’s a really funny word and I have no idea how it should be pronounced. I’m leaning towards “A-kiz-met”, but I’m open to suggestion.
Seriously though, Akismet rocks. What is it some of you might be asking?
Akismet, which is short for “Automattic Kismet”, is a WordPress plugin that catches all (I used this word on purpose) of the junky spam posts that bots try to lay on the business blog world each and every minute.
The reason I used the word “all” is because Akismet is smart. If Akismet doesn’t catch a bot comment, Akismet can learn to catch it next time. If you are monitoring your comments and watching for spam (you are reading each comment before approving it, right? ), you can point spammy posts to Akismet so that it can learn from it’s mistake.
Also cool, you can review all of the comments Akismet has caught and unspam any comment that shouldn’t be there. Akismet learns from this process as well, and is less likely to think a similar post is spam next time.
The best thing about Akismet is that it’s free. You can download it today and start using it now. You will need an API key to use it, but you can get your Akismet API key by registering at WordPress.com
Or, if you are “making mad paper” (I stole this cool line from the Akismet site) with your business blog, you can also kick in a few bucks for a commercial license.
Wrapping it up….
If you are using WordPress for your business blog, you need Akismet. You can spend way more time working on content instead of thinning spam comments.
July 30th, 2008 at 10:42 am
Akismet is certainly a time saver. In the four months that it has been installed it has trapped over 1000 spam comments. The occasional one gets through and they are easy to delete. Every now and then I have to reverse one as well, otherwise, it does a good job.
Before installing I probably spent as much time moderating out the spam as I did on writing content.
les