EE: Installing Akismet
Over the past years spam has become part of our daily life. Just think about those spam mails polluting our inbox or comment spam on our website. Fortunately there are some nice tools to fight spam: One of them is Akismet.
Actually Akismet is not a “tool” - it’s a service that you may use on your weblog. When a new comment, trackback, or pingback comes to your blog it is submitted to the Akismet web service which runs some tests on the comment and returns a thumbs up or thumbs down. When the plugin catches something as spam it saves it in the database for 15 days in case you want to check it out manually and then automattically deletes it. If you use WordPress as your CMS of choice just grab the respective plugin from the download page, enter your API key and relax. In case you use another CMS just check the list of available plugins.
Fortunately there is also an extension for Expression Engine. Once you’ve obtained a working WordPress API key, you can copy the respective files to your server. Install the extension in the “modules” section of the EE Control Panel and enjoy. Btw I’ve made use of EE’s custom tab functionality to gain quick access to the module, because I prefer double checking them manually. However up till now Akismet has not failed a single time. Give it a try.
16 comments so far
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Heiko October 08, 2006 at 05:20 PM
Thx for this short interesting introduction to Askimet, Wolfgang. Those Spam(-Comments) are really bothering.
Peter October 08, 2006 at 06:56 PM
I use it on my wp blog, got now about 5000 spam comments. One minus is that sometimes it takes normal comments as spam.
alex October 08, 2006 at 07:43 PM
Thanks a lot for this! I had not even heard of them before. Installed it within a few minutes just now and even turned captchas off to give it a good testing. We’ll see how it goes but it looks really promising.
Maybe this is the way to finnaly get rid of that new “hand made” spam that so annoying and on the rise since several weeks.
Peter October 08, 2006 at 08:16 PM
Better thing is to setup server to spam robots don’t find it. I see somedays ago text about what to do to make this happend. I try to find it, i think it was on digg.
Will October 09, 2006 at 03:52 AM
I see from the snapshot that you have themed the Expression Engine control panel. Looks pretty!
I’ve played around with themeing the control panel myself but found it to be frustrating given that you are limited to editing the css only. Therefore you are constrained by the underlying html – too many extraneous tables for my liking.
I’d love to know your thoughts – a future blog post perhaps?
Scott October 09, 2006 at 03:52 AM
Nice write-up Wolfgang!
@Peter,
Yes, Akismet has on occassion caught legitimate comments as spam however, the great thing about Akismet is that when you check manually, and tell the service that particular comment isn’t in fact spam, it learns that – so essentially, Akismet get’s smarter as a result.
Biomech October 09, 2006 at 05:48 AM
Wouldn’t having a “Preview Comment” function like Textpattern do the trick also?
Great read though, you are getting me more and more interested in EE. =D
Bob October 09, 2006 at 07:17 AM
I’ve used akismet for my wordpress blog and a custom cms for my site for a while now and couldn’t live without it. It’s missed about 5 comments in the time i’ve had it installed and i can’t recall it filtering any ‘good’ comments as spam.
I used an API someone wrote to integrate it into my site, it’s really easy to do. http://www.achingbrain.net/stuff/akismet/ – that’s the PHP5 class i used. Check out http://akismet.com/development/ for more…
Backspace October 10, 2006 at 06:47 AM
Wolfgang, how hard was it to customize your Control Panel’s look and feel in EE? Your customized version looks darn sweet!
Mike Holley October 10, 2006 at 07:20 AM
Thanks for the great posts on EE and your redesign. Here is a link for those wanting to customize the control panel as explained by Mark Boulton
Pati @-;-- October 10, 2006 at 10:54 AM
There are few stuff as annoying as spam. Luckyly, my husband activated Akismet too, and the honey moon began!
I hate expressions like: “Cool site. Thank you” that usually go followed by lots of links.
Now I can sit and laugh. But I guess spammers are thinking on another way to bother us, like comments with just one lonely link, that even Akismet sometimes misses.
Wolfgang October 10, 2006 at 03:50 PM
So Pati’s post was actually the first post that was accidentally marked as spam. But most likely because of the use of “Cool site” etc. :)
As for customizing the Control Panel: I’ve just copied one of the already existing themes, and customized some colors and background-images. Up till now I’ve just modified the header – so there is still some work to do.
kibik October 20, 2006 at 04:03 AM
EE: Installing Akismet
Thanx a lot! I’ve been looking for such instructions for an hour ;)
Russ Jones November 02, 2006 at 04:02 AM
There is another tool out there, linksleeve.org, which works similarly. A module is out for GeekLog and some other tools. It uses XML-RPC instead of REST…
Georrge November 10, 2006 at 04:53 PM
Thank you for this article. It is very useful and your feed is going straight into my newsreader!
Michael December 23, 2006 at 10:24 AM
I use Askimet on my WP blog and it does a god job. I don’t really worry about false positives since I don’t get many comments in the first place. Askimet hasn’t let either any or most spamies through since I started using it.