Plugins in use @ Moondance – Akismet

Posted by Michelle Petit-Sumrall as Blogging, Plugins, Wordpress, security

Continuing on from last week’s post on the Add-to-Any plugins, this week we’ll cover spam-comment protection with “Akismet”.

If a blog is designed to communicate your thoughts to the world, comments are the world’s way of responding back. The comment function is an integral part of the blog, though it can be disabled either on a post by post basis, or for your entire blog. Should you choose (as most people do) to allow comments, sooner or later you will discover “Spam comments”.

Spam comments come in many forms, from the merely annoying to the dangerous:

Spam in blogs (also called simply blog spam or comment spam) is a form of spamdexing. It is done by automatically posting random comments or promoting commercial services to blogs, wikis, guestbooks, or other publicly accessible online discussion boards. Any web application that accepts and displays hyperlinks submitted by visitors may be a target.

Adding links that point to the spammer’s web site artificially increases the site’s search engine ranking. An increased ranking often results in the spammer’s commercial site being listed ahead of other sites for certain searches, increasing the number of potential visitors and paying customers.ⁱ

Spam comments become dangerous when a spammer posts a link to a site designed to infect your machine with a virus or, worse, a “trojan horse“. That happened to me the other day on my other blog. Fortunately, I had Akismet plugged in and it caught the culprit.

Like most Wordpress plugins, Akismet is installed via a download->upload->activate mechanism. Since it is already available in your Moondance blog Dashboard under “Plugins”, simply scroll down to it and activate it.

Once that’s done, there is one more step. You will need to get an API key from the Wordpress.com site. If you happen to also want a free Wordpress blog, go ahead and leave the “Gimme a blog! (Like username.wordpress.com)” button checked; otherwise, make sure to click “Just a username, please.” You will then receive a confirmation email. Click the link included, and voila! you have an API key.

To find it, log in to Wordpress.com. Under “My account” (at the upper left of the page), you will find the “Edit Profile” link. Click that. Your key is just above the “Personal Options”. Copy it, and come back to your blog’s Dashboard. At the top of the page will be a link to enter your key, click it, and paste the key into the text box.

Done! Wasn’t that easy?

A few more notes. That key can be used for multiple tools, for ANY of your Wordpress powered blogs. You don’t need to get a new key for each blog, because it is meant to identify blogs belonging to you and no one else. Additionally, you can use it for other plugins, such as Wordpress Stats, which we will talk about next time.

Sphere: Related Content

1. Source: Wikipedia [↩]

Tags: Blogging, Plugins, security, Wordpress

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