Plugins

I think the best place to start our series on plugins is with Akismet, this is the plugin that’s already installed on any wordpress installation. In order to use akismet, you will not only have to activate it through your wordpress admin page by simply hitting “activate” on the plugins page; but you will have to enter your wordpress API key on the akismet configuration page.

Getting a wordpress API Key is free and simple; go to this page and fill out the short form choosing the option for “just a username, please.” You will get your new API Key in your email then you just need to enter that key into the field on your wordpress akismet configuration page. You can get to this page by choosing the plugins tab option then choosing akismet configuration.

Once you enter your free API Key and choose update options, akismet will begin working, it scans comments left on your site against a database of known spammers and spam words it then catches these spam comments and keeps them from landing on your blog. To review the comments left on your blog that have been caught by akismet, simply go to the comments tab option and choose akismet spam.

Every so often akismet will catch a comment that may not be spam, simply choose the option next to the comment that is not spam and then update, akismet will learn from these corrections. However it is still good practice to go through the akismet spam folder at regular intervals to make sure it is not catching things that are not spam.
Akismet does a very thorough job of catching spam, but sometimes depending on your blog the amount of akismet spam can be daunting, next week I’ll be telling you about a plug in you can get that works alongside with akismet to better catch spam and reduce the amount of comments you personally have to review.