Akismet is a service that
filters spam from comments,
trackbacks, and contact form
messages
A message is a discrete unit of communication intended by the source for consumption by some recipient or group of recipients. A message may be delivered by various means, including courier, telegraphy, carrier pigeon and electronic bus.
A ...
. The filter works by combining information about spam captured on all participating sites, and then using those spam rules to block future spam. Akismet is offered by
Automattic, the company behind
WordPress.com.
Launched on October 25, 2005, Akismet is said to have captured over 500 billion spam comments and pings as of November 2021.
History
The founder of Automattic,
Matt Mullenweg, says that he decided to create Akismet so that his mother could blog in safety. In 2005, there were discussions about how to deal with comment spam, and only few plug-ins were available for the purpose. Mullenweg's first attempt was a JavaScript plug-in which modified the comment form and hid fields, but within hours of its launch spammers downloaded it, figured out how it worked, and bypassed it.
In late 2005, Mullenweg launched the Akismet plug-in for WordPress. Akismet (which stands for Automatic kismet) is a way of dealing with spam in aggregate, a crowd-sourced spam-fighting tool.
Each time someone posts a comment to a participating website, Akismet checks it against all the comments in the database. If it is spam, it is deleted. If spam gets through and a user marks it as spam, the comment is added to the database so the pool of spam comments widens, making Akismet increasingly effective over time.
Using Akismet
Akismet was originally developed to integrate with a
plug-in
Plug-in, plug in or plugin may refer to:
* Plug-in (computing) is a software component that adds a specific feature to an existing computer program.
** Audio plug-in, adds audio signal processing features
** Photoshop plugin, a piece of softwar ...
for WordPress. The Akismet plug-in has been included by default in all WordPress builds since version 2.0 and activated in all
WordPress.com-hosted blogs.
A public Akismet
API has resulted in third-party plug-ins for other platforms. One is an official Akismet plug-in release for the open source internet forum software
Discourse
Discourse is a generalization of the notion of a conversation to any form of communication. Discourse is a major topic in social theory, with work spanning fields such as sociology, anthropology, continental philosophy, and discourse analysis. ...
.
To use Akismet, it is necessary to obtain an
API key. This key is necessary for a site to communicate with the Akismet servers.
Development and distribution
Released under the terms of the
GNU General Public License, the Akismet plug-in is
free software, although the code to the Akismet system itself (and the nature of the algorithm used) has not been released. The Akismet service is free for personal use and, as of November 2021, commercial plans start at less than $10 per month.
References
External links
*
{{Automattic Inc.
Spam filtering
WordPress
Anti-spam
Automattic