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 19, 2022 1 reply
This is a paid plugin, but they wont tell you that until after you download it and waste your valuable time. get 1 star'd
October 11, 2022
Akismet is a great plug in that does exactly what it says at a small annual charge. I have been using it for 3 years and it has saved me from a significant amount of spam on my website. Customer service is also responsive and knowledgable.
Read all 955 reviews

Contributors & Developers

“Akismet Spam Protection” has been translated into 72 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

5.0.2

Release Date – 1 December 2022

  • Improved compatibility with themes that hide or show UI elements based on mouse movements.
  • Increased security of API keys by sending them in request bodies instead of subdomains.

5.0.1

Release Date – 28 September 2022

  • Added an empty state for the Statistics section on the admin page.
  • Fixed a bug that broke some admin page links when Jetpack plugins are active.
  • Marked some event listeners as passive to improve performance in newer browsers.
  • Disabled interaction observation on forms that post to other domains.

5.0

Release Date – 26 July 2022

  • Added a new feature to catch spammers by observing how they interact with the page.

4.2.5

Release Date – 11 July 2022

  • Fixed a bug that added unnecessary comment history entries after comment rechecks.
  • Added a notice that displays when WP-Cron is disabled and might be affecting comment rechecks.

4.2.4

Release Date – 20 May 2022

  • Improved translator instructions for comment history.
  • Bumped the “Tested up to” tag to WP 6.0.

4.2.3

Release Date – 25 April 2022

  • Improved compatibility with Fluent Forms
  • Fixed missing translation domains
  • Updated stats URL.
  • Improved accessibility of elements on the config page.

4.2.2

Release Date – 24 January 2022

  • Improved compatibility with Formidable Forms
  • Fixed a bug that could cause issues when multiple contact forms appear on one page.
  • Updated delete_comment and deleted_comment actions to pass two arguments to match WordPress core since 4.9.0.
  • Added a filter that allows comment types to be excluded when counting users’ approved comments.

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.

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