Akismet Anti-spam: Spam Protection

Description

The best anti-spam protection to block spam comments and spam in a contact form. The most trusted antispam solution for WordPress and WooCommerce.

Akismet checks your comments and contact form submissions against our global database of spam to prevent your site from publishing malicious content. You can review the comment spam it catches on your blog’s “Comments” admin screen.

Major features in Akismet include:

  • Automatically checks all comments and filters out the ones that look like spam.
  • Each comment has a status history, so you can easily see which comments were caught or cleared by Akismet and which were spammed or unspammed by a moderator.
  • URLs are shown in the comment body to reveal hidden or misleading links.
  • Moderators can see the number of approved comments for each user.
  • A discard feature that outright blocks the worst spam, saving you disk space and speeding up your site.

PS: You’ll be prompted to get an Akismet.com API key to use it, once activated. Keys are free for personal blogs; paid subscriptions are available for businesses and commercial sites.

Installation

Upload the Akismet plugin to your blog, activate it, and then enter your Akismet.com API key.

1, 2, 3: You’re done!

Reviews

08 November 2024
The great thing about Akismet is that I don’t notice it. If an occasional comment does get through it is marked as spurious anyway. Great that it comes with Jetpack professional.
07 November 2024
I’ve been using Akismet for a number of years now. In all of that time I can’t recall it producing any false positives or false negatives.
07 November 2024
Akismet is an essential tool in fighting the biggest monster I face every day in using email: spam, irrelevant ads, and just plain evil design. –Paul
07 November 2024
This is a reliable plugin which I install on most sites. Keep up the good work and thanks for offering a free version. 🙂
Read all 1.096 reviews

Contributors & Developers

“Akismet Anti-spam: Spam Protection” has been translated into 73 locales. Thank you to the translators for their contributions.

Translate “Akismet Anti-spam: Spam Protection” into your language.

Interested in development?

Browse the code, check out the SVN repository, or subscribe to the development log by RSS.

Changelog

5.3.3

Release Date – 10 July 2024

  • Make setup step clearer for new users.
  • Remove the stats section from the configuration page if the site has been revoked from the key.
  • Skip the Akismet comment check when the comment matches something in the disallowed list.
  • Prompt users on legacy plans to contact Akismet support for upgrades.

5.3.2

Release Date – 21 March 2024

  • Improve the empty state shown to new users when no spam has been caught yet.
  • Update the message shown to users without a current subscription.
  • Add foundations for future webhook support.

5.3.1

Release Date – 17 January 2024

  • Make the plugin more resilient when asset files are missing (as seen in WordPress Playground).
  • Add a link to the ‘Account overview’ page on akismet.com.
  • Fix a minor error that occurs when another plugin removes all comment actions from the dashboard.
  • Add the akismet_request_args filter to allow request args in Akismet API requests to be filtered.
  • Fix a bug that causes some contact forms to include unnecessary data in the comment_content parameter.

5.3

Release Date – 14 September 2023

  • Improve display of user notices.
  • Add stylesheets for RTL languages.
  • Remove initial disabled state from ‘Save changes’ button.
  • Improve accessibility of API key entry form.
  • Add new filter hooks for Fluent Forms.
  • Fix issue with PHP 8.1 compatibility.

5.2

Release Date – 21 June 2023

  • Visual refresh of Akismet stats.
  • Improve PHP 8.1 compatibility.
  • Improve appearance of plugin to match updated stats.
  • Change minimum supported PHP version to 5.6 to match WordPress.
  • Drop IE11 support and update minimum WordPress version to 5.8 (where IE11 support was removed from WP Core).

5.1

Release Date – 20 March 2023

  • Removed unnecessary limit notices from admin page.
  • Improved spam detection by including post taxonomies in the comment-check call.
  • Removed API keys from stats iframes to avoid possible inadvertent exposure.

5.0.2

Release Date – 1 December 2022

  • Improved compatibility with themes that hide or show UI elements based on mouse movements.
  • Increased security of API keys by sending them in request bodies instead of subdomains.

5.0.1

Release Date – 28 September 2022

  • Added an empty state for the Statistics section on the admin page.
  • Fixed a bug that broke some admin page links when Jetpack plugins are active.
  • Marked some event listeners as passive to improve performance in newer browsers.
  • Disabled interaction observation on forms that post to other domains.

5.0

Release Date – 26 July 2022

  • Added a new feature to catch spammers by observing how they interact with the page.

4.2.5

Release Date – 11 July 2022

  • Fixed a bug that added unnecessary comment history entries after comment rechecks.
  • Added a notice that displays when WP-Cron is disabled and might be affecting comment rechecks.

4.2.4

Release Date – 20 May 2022

  • Improved translator instructions for comment history.
  • Bumped the “Tested up to” tag to WP 6.0.

4.2.3

Release Date – 25 April 2022

  • Improved compatibility with Fluent Forms
  • Fixed missing translation domains
  • Updated stats URL.
  • Improved accessibility of elements on the config page.

4.2.2

Release Date – 24 January 2022

  • Improved compatibility with Formidable Forms
  • Fixed a bug that could cause issues when multiple contact forms appear on one page.
  • Updated delete_comment and deleted_comment actions to pass two arguments to match WordPress core since 4.9.0.
  • Added a filter that allows comment types to be excluded when counting users’ approved comments.

4.2.1

Release Date – 1 October 2021

  • Fixed a bug causing AMP validation to fail on certain pages with forms.

4.2

Release Date – 30 September 2021

  • Added links to additional information on API usage notifications.
  • Reduced the number of network requests required for a comment page when running Akismet.
  • Improved compatibility with the most popular contact form plugins.
  • Improved API usage buttons for clarity on what upgrade is needed.

For older changelog entries, please see the additional changelog.txt file delivered with the plugin.