Akismet Anti-spam: Spam Protection

Description

The best anti-spam protection to block spam comments and spam in a contact form. The most trusted antispam solution for WordPress and WooCommerce.

Akismet checks your comments and contact form submissions against our global database of spam to prevent your site from publishing malicious content. You can review the comment spam it catches on your blog’s “Comments” admin screen.

Major features in Akismet include:

• Automatically checks all comments and filters out the ones that look like spam.
• Each comment has a status history, so you can easily see which comments were caught or cleared by Akismet and which were spammed or unspammed by a moderator.
• URLs are shown in the comment body to reveal hidden or misleading links.
• Moderators can see the number of approved comments for each user.
• A discard feature that outright blocks the worst spam, saving you disk space and speeding up your site.

PS: You’ll be prompted to get an Akismet.com API key to use it, once activated. Keys are free for personal blogs; paid subscriptions are available for businesses and commercial sites.

Installation

Upload the Akismet plugin to your blog, activate it, and then enter your Akismet.com API key.

1, 2, 3: You’re done!

Reviews

Good

aneblife October 20, 2024

Good!

Essential. No peace of mind without Akismet.

tazulay October 20, 2024

Essential. No peace of mind without Akismet.

10+ Years With No Spam ??

Nomad Skateboarding October 17, 2024

I’ve used Akismet on every one of my personal and client sites for over a decade. Yet to have a single spam comment/account get through. This is one of those services I pay for even with the ‘free’ version and still feel I’m getting the best end of the deal.

Simple Solution

brianallen October 14, 2024

It just works without me having to manage any aspect. No WordPress website should be without Akismet.

Nothing else comes close

Dan Knauss October 11, 2024

Akismet just works. You may never hear from it. You also won’t get any spam. Akismet has been around a long time and is one of the earliest examples of Machine Learning (ML) put to use on a massive sale through Automattic’s unmatched infrastructure for WordPress. It’s a distributed cloud solution that doesn’t require your WordPress installation or your web host to front the resources necessary to stop spammers. If a spammer visits your site and the Akismet network has seen them and their type of spam before, their comment or form submission will never reach your WordPress site. The only other effective and efficient plugin-based methods of spam *prevention* use honeypots and integrate with fail2ban, which isn’t the easiest thing to set up. Akismet just works — for comments and contact forms, custom forms built with Jetpack, and it can be easily extended for use with other well-documented form solutions, like Gravity Forms. Nothing else is as simple end effective as Akismet.

Excellent service

aalunste October 11, 2024

It obviously works well as I have not seen any spam.

Contributors & Developers

Changelog

5.3.3

Release Date – 10 July 2024

• Make setup step clearer for new users.
• Remove the stats section from the configuration page if the site has been revoked from the key.
• Skip the Akismet comment check when the comment matches something in the disallowed list.
• Prompt users on legacy plans to contact Akismet support for upgrades.

5.3.2

Release Date – 21 March 2024

• Improve the empty state shown to new users when no spam has been caught yet.
• Update the message shown to users without a current subscription.
• Add foundations for future webhook support.

5.3.1

Release Date – 17 January 2024

• Make the plugin more resilient when asset files are missing (as seen in WordPress Playground).
• Add a link to the ‘Account overview’ page on akismet.com.
• Fix a minor error that occurs when another plugin removes all comment actions from the dashboard.
• Add the akismet_request_args filter to allow request args in Akismet API requests to be filtered.
• Fix a bug that causes some contact forms to include unnecessary data in the comment_content parameter.

5.3

Release Date – 14 September 2023

• Improve display of user notices.
• Add stylesheets for RTL languages.
• Remove initial disabled state from ‘Save changes’ button.
• Improve accessibility of API key entry form.
• Add new filter hooks for Fluent Forms.
• Fix issue with PHP 8.1 compatibility.

5.2

Release Date – 21 June 2023

• Visual refresh of Akismet stats.
• Improve PHP 8.1 compatibility.
• Improve appearance of plugin to match updated stats.
• Change minimum supported PHP version to 5.6 to match WordPress.
• Drop IE11 support and update minimum WordPress version to 5.8 (where IE11 support was removed from WP Core).

5.1

Release Date – 20 March 2023

• Removed unnecessary limit notices from admin page.
• Improved spam detection by including post taxonomies in the comment-check call.
• Removed API keys from stats iframes to avoid possible inadvertent exposure.

5.0.2

Release Date – 1 December 2022

• Improved compatibility with themes that hide or show UI elements based on mouse movements.
• Increased security of API keys by sending them in request bodies instead of subdomains.

5.0.1

Release Date – 28 September 2022

• Added an empty state for the Statistics section on the admin page.
• Fixed a bug that broke some admin page links when Jetpack plugins are active.
• Marked some event listeners as passive to improve performance in newer browsers.
• Disabled interaction observation on forms that post to other domains.

5.0

Release Date – 26 July 2022

• Added a new feature to catch spammers by observing how they interact with the page.

4.2.5

Release Date – 11 July 2022

• Fixed a bug that added unnecessary comment history entries after comment rechecks.
• Added a notice that displays when WP-Cron is disabled and might be affecting comment rechecks.

4.2.4

Release Date – 20 May 2022

• Improved translator instructions for comment history.
• Bumped the “Tested up to” tag to WP 6.0.

4.2.3

Release Date – 25 April 2022

• Improved compatibility with Fluent Forms
• Fixed missing translation domains
• Updated stats URL.
• Improved accessibility of elements on the config page.

4.2.2

Release Date – 24 January 2022

• Improved compatibility with Formidable Forms
• Fixed a bug that could cause issues when multiple contact forms appear on one page.
• Updated delete_comment and deleted_comment actions to pass two arguments to match WordPress core since 4.9.0.
• Added a filter that allows comment types to be excluded when counting users’ approved comments.

4.2.1

Release Date – 1 October 2021

• Fixed a bug causing AMP validation to fail on certain pages with forms.

4.2

Release Date – 30 September 2021

• Added links to additional information on API usage notifications.
• Reduced the number of network requests required for a comment page when running Akismet.
• Improved compatibility with the most popular contact form plugins.
• Improved API usage buttons for clarity on what upgrade is needed.

For older changelog entries, please see the additional changelog.txt file delivered with the plugin.