Akismet

If you have been blogging for a month or two, you know about SPAM comments. You know where some person name “health insurance” tells you that you wrote a great post and gracefully signs it with a backlink to some totally unrelated website? Yup, that’s the one that we are talking about. If you don’t take action to combat comment spam, then you can easily find yourself moderating comments for hours if not days. Akismet, possibly the best way in the world to protect you from comment spam, has allowed us to focus on writing quality content rather than moderating comment spam.

Akismet is an Automattic invention created to filter out comment and trackback spam for you, so you can focus on more important things such as writing content and growing your business. If you look under your plugins section, you will find Akismet to be already installed. It comes bundled with all WordPress installations. You are only required to activate it. In order for you to successfully activate Akismet, you must signup at their website and get your personalized API key. Since it’s creation in 2005, Akismet has blocked billions of SPAM comments.

Criticism

While it is great at filtering spam comments, sometimes a legit comment can get caught in the filter. The reasoning for that is: if a commentator has been flagged as a spammer by one of the bloggers using Akismet then it becomes harder for them to participate in other blogs as a legit user. Their comments are sent to the spam section where it often goes unnoticed before it gets deleted by the blog editors along with other spam.

How to Know If Your Comment Was Detected As Spam

If your comment was detected by Akismet, you will not see your comment on the page saying Awaiting Moderation like it normally would. If you hit comment, and do not see the awaiting moderation notice, you should immediately contact the adminstrator of that site and ask them to make sure that your comment gets approved.

You can let your users know about this in your first post, in your about page, or in your contact page. This way their comment is not ignored. This will solve the problem raised with Akismet.