Akismet

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Akismet, or Automattic Kismet, is a spam filtering service created by Automattic, the corporation which employs most of the main developers of the weblog platform WordPress, and released on October 25, 2005. Akismet attempts to filter link spam from blog comments and spam TrackBack pings. The filter works by combining information about spam captured on all participating blogs, and then using those spam rules to block future spam. Akismet has captured one billion spam comments and pings as of March 2007.^[1]

Akismet was originally developed to integrate with a plugin for WordPress. It is now included by default in all WordPress builds since version 2.0 and activated in all WordPress.com-hosted blogs. A public Akismet API has resulted in an Automattic sponsored plugin for Movable Type,^[2] and third-party plugins for other platforms ^[3]. Released under the GPL license^[4], the Akismet plugin is free software, although the code to the Akismet system itself (and the nature of the algorithm used) has not been released.

The Akismet service is free for personal use. To use Akismet with most blogs, it is necessary to obtain a WordPress.com API key. Bloggers with a Yahoo! hosting account get a free "pro-blogger" Akismet service (which costs non-Yahoo! users $5/month) due to a deal between the two companies.^[5]

1 Criticism 2 Competitors 3 References 4 External links

[edit] Criticism

Many bloggers have complained of commenters being wrongfully flagged as spammers.^[6] Once a commenter is flagged as a spammer, it becomes difficult to participate on a wordpress blog which uses Akismet filter because comments are sent to the spam queue before approval or deletion.

There is also evidence that those who have an opinion that differs from the programmers face blackballing by the Akismet service.^[7] Those that voice a negative opinion about the actions of Matt Mullenweg frequently find themselves blackballed by this service^[8].

[edit] Competitors

There are a number of competitors to Akismet, including Mollom, Defensio, and Typepad Antispam. In addition, image or maths capture plugins are also widely used instead of Akismet.