How to deal with WordPress comment spam

The chances of comment spam getting a stranglehold on your WordPress blog are slimmer if you have the Akismet plugin activated and you have an API key (an API key is a set of letters and numbers specific to your account).

The graphic above comes from the Akismet Stats section of my WordPress dashboard. You can see that this blog has received 779 spam comments since 9 March 2010. That equates to about 10 a day. Akismet automatically deletes these comments so I don’t have to sort through them.

How to activate Akismet

Navigate to the ‘Plugins’ menu of the WordPress admin area and activate the Akismet plugin in the usual way. When you activate the plugin, look for the ‘Akismet Configuration’ link (in the ‘Plugins’ menu).

This is what the next page looks like

Click on the Akismet link or use this one http://akismet.com/get/

Go through the sign up process.

Here are the screens you’ll see (I have used an email address specifically for this demo, you don’t have to do this, you can use any email address that is not already registered with Akismet).

Step 1

Enter your email address

Step 2

Enter a username and tick the box

Step 3

Success!

Now go check your inbox for the confirmation email (mine ended up in the spam folder (!) so don’t forget to check that if you don’t see the email straight away).

Click on the link to activate your account. The page success page looks like this:

Read the contents of the page and make a note of your API key, username and password (you may need the username and password later, but for setting up Akismet, you only need the API key). The API key will also be emailed to you.

Now navigate back over to WordPress > Plugins > Akismet Configuration and enter the API key in the box provided

If everything has gone according to plan you should see this message

That’s it! Akismet is now protecting your blog from spam. Some may slip through, but Akismet does catch a lot of it.

Related posts: