Lowter

PunBB Akismet Spam Plugin

Published on the 18th of October 2008

By Ethan Poole

Those of you who are members of the Lowter Forums (which I highly encourage you to become) may have noticed the huge increase in spam in the past few weeks. It got to the point where we were just pruning the New Users forum in order to remove the spam from the site as quickly as possible. Months after Matt showed me the Akismet plugin for PunBB (external link) (the forum software we use), I finally got around to installing the plugin and tackling the spam problem we've been having. Some spam still gets through the filter, but overall it catches almost all of the spam, especially the more offensive stuff. It works great for being free too!

For those who don't know, Akisme (external link) is a spam filtering service from Automattic (external link), the company behind the very popular WordPress blogging software. Akismet is the filter used on all WordPress.com blogs to filter comment spam, and it does the job pretty well. One nice thing is that the filter is basically free. In order to get an API key, you only have to signup for a WordPress.com account. Then you can use your API key in the Akismet plugins that developers have made for various other applications.

The Akismet plugin for PunBB is very easy to install, requiring only a small block of code in the post.php file, in addition to a few additional files you'll have to upload. It also includes an admin plugin to manage the spam that the filter catches, allowing you to mark a post as "Not spam" or to delete all the spam caught by the filter. If you're using PunBB, then I highly suggest that you install the Akismet plugin to avoid the spam plague!

For other apps, use these plugins:

• PHP5 Akismet (external link), a class allowing you to utilise Akismet in your own PHP projects
• WordPress (external link) (not hosted)
• Drupal (external link)
• MoveableType (external link)
• Joomla (external link)
• vBulletin (external link)
• Django (external link)
• phpBB (external link)
• Textpattern (external link)

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