Tag Archives: Akismet

How to Defeat Cyrillic Spam in WordPress

Jun 17, 2011 by Matt | Posted in WordPress No Comments

Lately, I have been getting a lot of Cyrillic comment spam. It tends to slip past Akismet, as well as the built-in WordPress spam filters. They’re always spam, never legit comments. (As this is an English-language blog, there wouldn’t be much point for somebody to post non-English comments, anyway…)

It has been a minor annoyance for me, since I get a few every week and have to manually remove them.

Fortunately, Jeff Starr (of Digging into WordPress fame) has come up with a solution. Apparently you can put Unicode characters into the WordPress comment blacklist…which of course would include Cyrillic characters. I don’t know why I didn’t think of that to begin with, it’s so simple. :)

Anyway, his post includes several characters you can copy and paste into your blacklist.

10 Characters for Your WordPress Blacklist [Perishable Press]

I Don’t Like Spam!

Jan 30, 2009 by Matt | Posted in Internet No Comments

Look at this impressive chart:

Akismet Spam Graph

Now that looks like a lot of something. Too bad it’s spam. Yes, this graph is generated from Akismet’s log of the spam comments it has caught over time.

Continue reading →

Akismet: Not Very Intuitive

Aug 8, 2008 by Matt | Posted in WordPress 5 Comments

I think it’s safe to say you’ve heard of Akismet. Good old Akismet, by the makers of WordPress, is the de facto standard for blocking comment spam. It normally does an excellent job, though it misses a few spam comments here and there.

I think it’s safe to say that 98% of WordPress users (I made that number up, just so you know) use Akismet.

But what about the web newbies, just installing WordPress for the first time? You know, the people who don’t have a whole lot of experience with the web, but heard about blogging and WordPress, and decided to set it up with Fantastico on a cheap shared webhost. Those people are in for an unpleasant surprise…

Akismet, by default is deactivated, therefore unprotected. The equivalent of running a Windows-based PC on the internet without a firewall and antivirus, the blog will be slammed with spam pretty quick. It may not be a lot at first, but it will happen.

And not only is Akismet not activated by default, it’s buried on the Plugins page, where non-techies aren’t necesarily going to look. Then you need an API key to use the plugin, which requires registering for a blog at WordPress.com (a most confusingly named site) and then hunting down the page with the API key and pasting it into the plugin settings on your blog.

Here’s how it should work: When you first install WordPress, it should gently nudge you to activate Akismet, and like to the Plugins tab. When you activate the plugin, it should request that you enter your API key, and instead of telling you to get one from WordPress.com, link to Akismet.com, and let them applu for one there.

Akismet for SMF

Feb 22, 2008 by Matt | Posted in Services and Tools 3 Comments

My favorite software for creating forums is Simple Machines Forum, or SMF for short. It’s a free PHP forum script that I believe surpasses phpBB in quality and feature set (though I haven’t tried the latest phpBB version yet).

One problem, however, is spam. Virtually all forums are plagued by spam posts and user registrations, creating hours of tedious work for the administrators.

I just found an SMF mod that implements Akismet for the SMF system: SMF-Akismet.

If only I’d found it a year ago, when I really needed it!

I will take this opportunity to point you in the direction of the Akismet Development page. If you head over there, you can find libraries for PHP and other languages, as well as plugins for other CMS and forum scripts (like phpBB or Joomla). Akismet can be used nearly anywhere that comment spam is a problem.