Unfortunately, blogs are a major target for spammers who use automated software to submit useless and unrelated comments to blog posts which often contain links to malicious software or online scams. Even newer blogs which still have very few visitors will likely end up with a fair amount of spam comments, and the problem can very quickly spiral out of control once your readership starts to grow. WordPress comes with a highly effective spam filter built in, and this will take care of the vast majority of spam comments to make sure that they never get published. This spam filter plugin is called Akismet, and it comes preinstalled with all new WordPress blogs. However, there are a few additional steps to take in order to get it up and running, and this should be one of the first things that you do upon launching your new blog. This process is explained below.
- Before you can use the Akismet spam filter, you will need to acquire an API key. To do this, visit akismet.com/wordpress and click on the button “Get an Akismet API key”.
- Enter your email address, username and password on the next page and click “Sign up”.
- Check your email to find a message from Akismet containing your API key. Be sure to keep this key private.
- Log in to your WordPress administrator dashboard and go to the Plugins page. Locate the Akismet plugin and click “Activate” just beneath it.
- Click “Activate your Akismet account” once the plugin has been activated. Click “I already have a key” and enter your key on the next page. Click on “Save Changes”. The plugin will start protecting your blog from spam comments immediately.
If your blog is hosted on wordpress.com rather than having its own domain name, you should be provided with a wordpress.com API key by email once you have signed up for your account. For WordPress-hosted blogs, this API key is all you need to activate the plugin.
Once activated, you can configure various additional Akismet settings by navigating to Plugins > Akismet in your WordPress administrator dashboard. If there is any problem with the plugin, you will be able to find out here. By clicking on the “Stats” button on this page, you will also be able to view statistics and graphs detailing the plugin’s performance over a set period of time.