Akismet: stop comment spam 101

by kai on 01/12/2006



I’ve implemented akismet for Blog in Black the other day, after reading about it in Kay’s blog. Akismet is really amazing – it’s basically a wordpress plugin (implemented as some sort of HTTP-based service), which talks to a huge spamfilter hosted somewhere. The akismet plugin posts all the comment information to this service and gets a spam or nospam result back. Then it’s up to you as a user what to do with this result.

The good thing is – you do not need to run wordpress to use akismet. They provide an API which you can just talk to and leverage this functionality for any type of application (blog, forum, guestbook etc.). Brendon Harper developed a CFC to use akismet in ColdFusion, which is extremly straight forward to use, awesome work mate!

There is also an official akismet plugin for Movable Type – which I use for this blog; but as my MT installation is heavily customized and tweaked with CF anyway, I thought I’d go with the CFC directly. It literally took me less than 15 minutes to set it up and get it running properly – including altering queries to my DB and comment email handling. The biggest effort was to create my free wordpress accout – which you need to get a developers key for their API 🙂

And to make it clear again – it really works. I’m running it for nearly a week and no false judgements up to now – I’m currently still double-checking the SPAM comments as well to make sure…:)

{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }

flashape December 1, 2006 at 12:00 am

yeah, akismet is crazy. stops..spam..dead.

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Tim December 1, 2006 at 12:00 am

yep second that,,,, awsome, 48,160 spam caught so far.

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Brandon Harper December 6, 2006 at 12:00 am

Thanks for the link Kai. I’m not sure why more people are not using it yet vs. the annoying CAPTCHA stuff– though I do need to get around to writing some documentation for it. I’ll probably do some prodding of BlogCFC users once I have valid documentation for it, though really it’s dead simple to use.

BTW, we were in the Bloggers BoF at CFUnited 05 but I didn’t have a chance to formally meet you. 🙂

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