The bane of the Internet today is spam. Spam is the biggest problem that webmasters have to grapple with. This is because it dampens the experience of users on a website and dilutes the quality of content. Spammers are finding smarter and more creative ways to spam websites everyday. The only way that your website can stand a chance against the advanced technology used by spammers is to use WordPress plugins such as Akismet.
Akismet is really a simple script that acts as filter and prevents spam showing up on your website. It specifically filters spam comments popularly now referred to as “spomment”. The Akismet servers are able to filter our spam at a very high level by combining various components and intelligence collected from blogs that participate in pinging.
How to use it
Akismet is fairly easy to use. A default WordPress installation normally comes pre-installed with this script and all you need to do is to activate it from the plugin page. The next thing you need to do is to register an API key. The API key basically allows your website to communicate with Akismet’s servers.
To register an API key you simply signup at akismet.com/signup. Select the personal website option and you will not have to pay anything. You will get your API key delivered directly to your mailbox. Navigate to the configuration page of your website and enter the API key. Akismet will immediately go to work to reduce and even completely eliminate “spomment” and trackback spam on your website.
In the unlikely event that a spam message happens to find its way to your site comments, simply mark it as spam and Akismet will record this action and recall this intelligence when dealing with future comments.
A Few Setbacks
Even though Akismet has been able to deal with the problem of “spomment” on WordPress blogs and websites to a large extent, a few problems have been noted lately. The first is that the heavy traffic on the servers sometimes leads to an overload. The effect of this is that sometimes comments simply vanish or some other funny behavior is noticed. However, in most cases this is quickly resolved. The second point is that Akismet is no longer free for business use. Businesses have to pay a nominal fee of between $5 and $100 per month depending on the size of the size and needs of the business.