The Playground

Spam is the bane of the internet and you've probably noticed how much rubbish can get downloaded to your inbox. Comment and trackback spam is the latest target from advertisers and unscrupulous website owners and can cause real headaches.

Movable Type has several plugins available to control comment and trackback spam. The one I have chosen to protect this weblog is Automattic Kismet (Akismet for short), a collaborative effort to make comment and trackback spam a non-issue and restore innocence to blogging, so you never have to worry about spam again. Akismet was developed initially for Word Press, but has since been made available to many more blogging platforms.

When a new comment, trackback, or pingback comes to your blog it is submitted to the Akismet web service which runs hundreds of tests on the comment and returns a thumbs up or thumbs down.

Part of the idea of Akismet is that you're always protected up-to-the-second from the latest dirty tricks of spammers. There's no maintenance, no upgrading, no hassle.

MT-Akismet is a plugin that transparently integrates Movable Type's junk handling capabilities with the Akismet collaborative spam filtering service.

For many people, Akismet will greatly reduce or even completely eliminate the comment and TrackBack spam you get on your sites. If one does happen to get through, simply mark it as "Junk" and Akismet will learn from the mistake.

You need to get an API key by signing up for a username at Wordpress.com, and enter it in the plugin configuration page.