Today while at work, my HTC Hero started flashing incessantly as I received email after email about moderating “new blog comments”. Normally I’d welcome such an occurrence but in this case every single one was spam.

I thought, “No problem, I’ll just look at the IP and block that IP”. Unfortunately, each of the messages was somehow coming from a different IP! Perhaps they were being generated from a network of spambots, or perhaps a lot of people suddenly hate me. Regardless, I wanted it to stop.

This is when I came across the free Akismet WordPress plugin. You can of course read about it at the official website or at Wikipedia. But what you really need to know is:

1. It does a great job at marking comments as spam in a similar manner to GMail. Anything mis-categorized can be unmarked as spam and the filters supposedly get smarter.
2. It is automatically included (but deactivated by default) with WordPress for all WordPress versions since 2.0.

Installing

1. All you need to do is goto Admin, click on Plugins, find Akismet, and click on Activate.
2. After the plugin is activated, click on edit.
3. There will be a box asking for your API Key, with a link on top which you can click on to get your new API key.  Click the link.
4. You are taken to the Akismet website, where they ask you for your email address and username.   Follow the listed steps, and await an email.
5. Read the email, click on the link to verify your email address.
6. Take the provided API Key and copy it into the box from step 3.
7. Rejoice in the lack of spam!

Checking for Mis-categorized Messages

1. Login to Admin.
2. Click on Comments.
3. Choose the Spam category.
4. If you see a mis-categorized message, hover over the content and click on Not Spam.