If you’re using WordPress blog, you must be knowing that how serious the comments spam, trackbacks spam and pingbacks spam to your blog. The spam posting to your blog can take up a lot of system resources and precious storage space, beside annoying your website visitors. If you let comments spam or trackback spams getting out of control, it may affect your search engine ranking too, as most of your outgoing links point to spam or useless websites. Automattic Kismet is a plugin for WordPress blog that based on collaborative effort to filter out and prevent comment and trackback spam from successfully posted on your blog.

Akismet WordPress Plugin has been upgraded to version 2.0. Akismet blog has details about the new features of Akismet 2.0:

  • Instead of just viewing the last 150 comments, you can now page through everything caught by Akismet.
  • There was a performance bug which could cause the old plugin to be pretty hard on the DB when getting a ton of spam, now it doesn’t.
  • You can now search the Akismet caught queue.
  • Longer timeout so it’s less likely to let spam through if you have a free key and the load is high. (With a paid key you always are in the priority queue.)
  • The counters now update properly when you clear things out.
  • A recheck moderation queue page on the WP moderation page to re-submit things in your moderation queue, so if gosh forbid Akismet ever were to go down you could have it recheck all your comments later.
  • A new counter widget you can put in your sidebar to show a live count of your spam, see an example on my site.
  • It kills the open_proxy_check option in WordPress 2.0 that causes false positives.
  • You can hardcode your API key in the plugin file to hide the configuration page and enable Akismet as a mu-plugin for WordPress MU.
  • If Akismet is unable to contact the mothership, it now has much friendlier debug messages.
  • Akismet can be instructed to discard spam that comes in on entries older than a month. The option is available on the Akismet configuration page under Plugins.

You can download Akismet WordPress Plug-in 2.0 to update your Akismet individually by downloading Akismet 2.0 in zip file, or upgrade your WordPress to version 2.1 that incorporates built-in updated Akismet plugin.

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