Spam. What Spam? WordPress Plugin Of The Week: Akismet.

I know. We may have missed a ‘plugin of the week’ last week (sorry) – my colleague, Connor, (not to mention any names) has been really busy with stuff so I’m stepping up to help keep this going!

This post will probably resonate with any WordPress web designers/developers out there.

The Scenario

You’ve just put the morning coffee on and you sit down at your desk. It’s going to be a fine day.

Then the phone rings. You answer politely to a disgruntled client explaining that they’re receiving 90 comments on their blog per day… “Sounds great”, you say. “No” they say, forwarding you an email – something like the below:

“Hmmm”, you say, “Looks like some sort of comment spam”. “Have I been hacked?” they say. “No” you say… The conversation continues like this for about 20 minutes and you end the call by saying “I’ll look into this and get back to you”.

Life doesn’t have to be this way

Akismet can prevent these annoying calls and restore a sense of calm to this crazy world (and you can enjoy your morning coffee in peace).

Akismet is an advanced hosted anti-spam service aimed at thwarting the underbelly of the web. It efficiently processes and analyzes masses of data from millions of sites and communities in real time. To fight the latest and dirtiest tactics embraced by the world’s most proficient spammers, it learns and evolves every single second of every single day. Because you have better things to do. http://akismet.com/

So yeah, it stops all the annoying commenting spam.

The best part? It’s incredibly easy to us; simply ‘sign up’ and ‘activate’. Job done.

You can use Akismet for free for personal sites (if you have a heart of stone) but if you’re feeling charitable you can add a donation (or name your price) to ‘help them fight spam’. The pricing plan is otherwise very simple and well worth every penny: http://akismet.com/plans/.

Akismet – deservedly our plugin of the week.