Incoherent Babble

After my last post about all the crap data the Akismet plugin phones home with when it’s checking for comment spam, I did a quick Technorati search for Akismet plugin, and found someone else who had the exact same thoughts about it, apparently after reading a wordpress.org post that voices the same concerns.

So, with so much hub-ub going on about it, I’m pleased to release the latest version of my enhanced Akismet plugin, which includes a “Neuter Akismet” option. Just tick the check box on the Akismet Configuration panel and your security concerns are gone.

Note that, while this hasn’t caused any problems for me, your mileage may vary. If you find out that something is horribly and utterly broken, please turn off the option and let me know what happened. There’s really no reason at all this stuff should need to be sent, but that’s not to say they realize that…

Complete Changes List

Whitelist / Blacklist
There are now fields for “Whitelist” and “Blacklist” options on the Akismet Configuration panel. Just pop an author, email address, or IP address into its respective field, and watch those comments show up in the Akismet SPAM.

This blacklisting functionality differs from the built-in Wordpress blacklisting in that it checks the specific attribute you set it for (ie: if you set an email address to be blacklisted, the comment is only spam’ed if that email address is found in the email field, whereas Wordpress would check for it in any of the fields - author, email, ip, etc.).

This section is heavily under testing. If you use it, please let me know how it works out. In the few controlled tests I’ve done on both my test blog and this live blog, it’s worked, but that’s by no means a complete test regime. Feedback is heavily encouraged!

Email Notification
I was able to modify the stock Wordpress comment notification script to suit our needs. You’ll now recieve emails whenever something is classified as SPAM (assuming you’ve turned on this option in the Akismet Configuration panel).

Please note that I had some odd results with this in one test… While I did receive the email, it listed post information that was in no way seemingly related to the post my comment was actually blocked on… I’ll continue to test, but in the mean-time, this should at least let you know something’s going on, which is better than before, right?

Neuter Akismet
As noted above, the primary reason I wanted to rush this version out is the growing concern over data Akismet is unnecessarily sending back to their server when every comment is checked. For more details, please read my last post, as well as the series of posts linked earlier.

Good luck, and please let me know how this version is working out for you!