April 20th, 2019
Akismet Anti-Spam is an open-source software. Akismet essentially is a comment spam filtering service made by Automattic and Kismet. To date, it has caught more than 85 billion spam comments. Akismet checks your comments and contact form submissions against its global database of spam to prevent your site from publishing malicious content. Spam can be reviewed as Akismet catches it 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 un-spammed 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.
You’ll need an API key from Akismet.com to use it. Keys are free for personal blogs. Paid subscriptions are available for businesses and commercial sites.
Spam Volume
The amount of spam comments can reach as high as 85% (depending upon your site's popularity). This means that out of 100 comments, less than 15% would be legitimate. Moderating the comments on your website can be tedious at best. Akismet can save you several hours of weeding through all your comments to remove spam. This is because Akismet will grab spam before it hits your moderation queue and set it as pending.
Conclusion
Spam comments can be painful to filter out manually and affect many WordPress sites. As your website gains in traffic, using Akismet well help to reduce the amount of spam. As soon as you install Akismet, you will want to obtain a license for the API, and Akismet will be hard at work filtering the spam on your website. If you have not already done so, you should consider using Akismet today.