Akismet Spam Protection

Description

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

November 12, 2021
It USED to be free. Now if you have ANY ads on your pages, they want you to pay for the plugin. You have to check a box agreeing that you don't have ads. I thought about paying $1 but on second thought, phooey on them. That's just cheating and it's LOW. They can't make enough on actual COMMERCIAL sites?
November 9, 2021
I’ve had such a great experience with Akismet. There are many plugins trying to solve the spam problem, this one is the best. I’ve used this service on multiple websites and have been extremely pleased. Fire and forget setup, near perfect.
Read all 928 reviews

Contributors & Developers

“Akismet Spam Protection” has been translated into 71 locales. Thank you to the translators for their contributions.

Translate “Akismet Spam Protection” into your language.

Interested in development?

Browse the code, check out the SVN repository, or subscribe to the development log by RSS.

Changelog

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.

4.1.12

Release Date – 3 September 2021

  • Fixed “Use of undefined constant” notice.
  • Improved styling of alert notices.

4.1.11

Release Date – 23 August 2021

  • Added support for Akismet API usage notifications on Akismet settings and edit-comments admin pages.
  • Added support for the deleted_comment action when bulk-deleting comments from Spam.

4.1.10

Release Date – 6 July 2021

  • Simplified the code around checking comments in REST API and XML-RPC requests.
  • Updated Plus plan terminology in notices to match current subscription names.
  • Added rel="noopener" to the widget link to avoid warnings in Google Lighthouse.
  • Set the Akismet JavaScript as deferred instead of async to improve responsiveness.
  • Improved the preloading of screenshot popups on the edit comments admin page.

4.1.9

Release Date – 2 March 2021

  • Improved handling of pingbacks in XML-RPC multicalls

4.1.8

Release Date – 6 January 2021

  • Fixed missing fields in submit-spam and submit-ham calls that could lead to reduced accuracy.
  • Fixed usage of deprecated jQuery function.

4.1.7

Release Date – 22 October 2020

  • Show the “Set up your Akismet account” banner on the comments admin screen, where it’s relevant to mention if Akismet hasn’t been configured.
  • Don’t use wp_blacklist_check when the new wp_check_comment_disallowed_list function is available.

4.1.6

Release Date – 4 June 2020

  • Disable “Check for Spam” button until the page is loaded to avoid errors with clicking through to queue recheck endpoint directly.
  • Add filter “akismet_enable_mshots” to allow disabling screenshot popups on the edit comments admin page.

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