Announcing Akismet for WordPress

You may remember an earlier post entitled The Silence of the Spams where I announced the impending WordPress plugin called Automattic Spam Stopper. This plugin has recently been released as a publicly available plugin renamed Akismet.

For a month or so, I have had only one other anti-spam measure on my site, that being a command to hold a comment for moderation if there are more than two links on it. My blacklist is clear and there are no key words to force any comment to moderation. This is usually information that I wouldn’t dare to release, but since I have been using this plugin I have lost my fear of spam. Seriously, I get maybe 3-4 spams a week using this setup. As you know, there are no codewords to type in to post a comment here, no skewed letters to decipher before your comment is allowed and no requirement that you have a positive comment in the past.

This plug-in produces “The Silence of the Spams” without making legitimate commentators jump through hoops. I love it! If you want the same freedom that I have been enjoying, head over to Akismet.com and try it out for yourself! It does require that you have a WordPress.Com API key at this time, and for someone in need I do have one WP.Com invite to offer. The first WordPress user who requests the invite in the comments gets it. You can use the WP.Com account as a side blog, a testing ground for formatting future posts or whatever you like. I’m fine with it if you only use it for the Akismet plugin, as I haven’t exactly been active in my own WP.Com blog.