Akismet for ExpressionEngine

Comment spam and trackback spam are a big nuisance. Not only for bloggers, but also for the ones making the blogging software like Movable Type, WordPress and — of course — ExpressionEngine. And although the latter is already fitted with some excellent anti-spam measures, no single system is waterproof. That’s why I decided that EE needed Akismet in its arsenal.

→ Download the Akismet for ExpressionEngine Combo

Update (2009-03-01): Available now: Low NoSpam. Use either Akismet or TypePad AntiSpam to battle spam on comments, gallery comments, trackbacks, forum posts and wiki articles!

What does it do?

If a member leaves a comment, the comment is sent to the online Akismet service at akismet.com. There it will be evaluated and a verdict of either ’spam’ or ‘okay’ is sent back (this happens quickly, hardly any delay).

If a comment is considered ’spam’, its status is set to ‘closed’. If a comment is considered ‘okay’, the comment is posted normally.

You can mark closed comments as either Spam (if Akismet was right) or Ham (if Akismet was wrong). This is sent back to the Akismet service, so it can learn from its mistakes, keeping commentspam to a bare minimum.

It also checks incoming trackbacks in a similar way, but in the current version of ExpressionEngine (1.5.1) there is no native trackback moderation algorithm. Rather than building this myself, this combo simply ignores any trackback that Akismet considers to be spam. However, this means that there’s no record of a trackback being ignored. If and when the EllisLab team decides to add trackback moderation to EE, then I’ll upgrade this combo to make use of that.

System requirements

This combo will only work with ExpressionEngine 1.5.1 Build - 20061016 and onwards! If you’ve got an earlier version of EE, you might consider version 0.1.0 of this combo, which only checks your comments. Version 0.1.0 can be found in the ExpressionEngine Forums.

New in version 1.0 - 2006.11.14

  • Added trackback checks
  • Added the setting “Check comments made by registered members”, (default: no)
  • Added the setting “Check trackbacks” (default: yes)

New in version 1.1 - 2006.12.08

  • Added option to moderate incoming comments when the Akismet service is unreachable (default: yes)

Installation / upgrade

Please check the readme.txt file for installation and upgrade instructions.

November 14th 2006 | Add-Ons, ExpressionEngine, Spam Prevention | 41 comments

Comments

  1. 1 Geof Harries November 15th 2006, 18:36

    Fantastic extension. I had tried an earlier edition but it broke several sections of the control panel. With EE 1.5.1 and this version, it’s golden. Great work.

  2. 2 Woordenaar November 28th 2006, 09:32

    Het grootste probleem met Akismet is toch de afhankelijkheid van de Akismet server. Server down en de spam komt binnen. Plus, de reacties komen evengoed, welliswaar tijdelijk, in je database. Is Bad Behavior ook bruikbaar voor EE?

  3. 3 Low November 28th 2006, 10:18

    @Woordenaar: I’ll reply in English, if you don’t mind, since this post is meant for an international audience. :)

    The Akismet server is pretty reliable. In the time that I’ve used it, it’s been down only once, I believe. I also thought of an option in this combo (not yet implemented): moderate comments when the Akismet server is unreachable. That’ll get rid of that problem.

    And yes, a Bad Behaviour 2 extension is available for EE.

  4. 4 Bence January 13th 2007, 10:28

    Just installed it, thanks for making it available!

  5. 5 arin March 2nd 2007, 20:07

    just curious if this works with ee’s photo gallery comments, as well. that seems to be where the spammers are hitting me the most, lately.

  6. 6 Low March 2nd 2007, 20:41

    I’m afraid not, arin. But I’ll take that into account when I can find the time to upgrade the combo to a newer version.

  7. 7 arin March 2nd 2007, 22:10

    ah, kk. thank you for your quick response! i’ve very few spots anyone can actually leave comments on my site, so i guess the photo gallery was the best place they could find. maybe a “please post spam here” page with comments enabled, until such a time as you upgrade to a newer version :) it works with grafitti, hey? :D

  8. 8 rouge March 16th 2007, 01:56

    Hi

    I would like to use an older version of your akismet combo (for EE 1.4.2). Unfortunately in the pmachine support forums the file isn’t downloadable. I’m not sure if this have to do with the change of their URL. Is there a other possibility to get the older version of your combo?

    thank you in advance for your helb

  9. 9 Low March 16th 2007, 09:29

    I’m afraid I didn’t keep the old version, myself. But I think this is an issue with the new EE forums. I submitted a bug report for this.

  10. 10 Chris March 20th 2007, 13:17

    Thanks for this! Since switching from handcoded pages to EE I’ve been getting hit with a ton of comment spam. Just installed this extension. Hope it works.

  11. 11 Mark Goldstein May 31st 2007, 14:16

    Hi.

    Does this work with EE 1.5.2?

  12. 12 Low May 31st 2007, 15:27

    Yes it does, Mark.

  13. 13 rouge May 31st 2007, 21:29

    Thank you - meanwhile I’ve updated to V 1.5.2 It works superbe and I wanted to thank you for your work!

  14. 14 Matt Fitzsimmons June 12th 2007, 04:24

    I’m trying to install this, and many of the files are missing from the 1.1 download. Namely the following:

    lang.akismet_check.php
    mod.akismet.php
    mcp.akismet.php

  15. 15 Low June 12th 2007, 11:31

    Matt, I’ve checked, but it would seem the zip contains all necessary files. Try and download it again. If it fails, I’d be happy to send you the zip by email.

  16. 16 Matt Fitzsimmons June 14th 2007, 09:51

    I did try several times that day with no success. Now, however, the last two are there, but lang.akismet_check.php is not.

    But as I was writing that, I had an idea. I wondered if my processor I have running on my downloads folder was messing it up. I unzipped in another folder, and everything is there. I have it set to remove duplicate files, so it’s possible that it thought they were the same for some reason.

  17. 17 Matt Fitzsimmons June 14th 2007, 09:54

    Just by way of verification, I looked in the trash and all the missing files from the several attempts were there. Weird…

    So it was completely my fault.

  18. 18 Victor July 1st 2007, 15:58

    i must say great work.
    works like a charm helps to prevent spam and now it reduces my spam on my site for nearly 90%.
    was using this for wordpress already and i am glad it came to EE

    cant say enough thank you very much

  19. 19 Sue July 6th 2007, 01:47

    Hey, Low, what about EE 1.6?

  20. 20 Low July 9th 2007, 10:39

    No problems so far, Sue.

  21. 21 Chris July 14th 2007, 23:49

    Just wanted to say thanks for this, works a charm.

  22. 22 ewitch July 25th 2007, 00:22

    Thank you for the wonderful module!
    Is there a way to customize the text presented when a comment is flagged by Akismet?

  23. 23 Tangotiger November 9th 2007, 21:09

    I installed on my EE blog, and it works well. Thanks much.

    There is a perfomance hit, about 5 extra seconds. That may be due to me being behind a firewall. I’ll test at home.

  24. 24 Adam December 21st 2007, 07:00

    I’m currently trying to install but am running into a problem.

    When I try to go to the modules section of my control panel i get the following error:

    Unable to load the following language file:
    /lang.askimet.php

    I thought that the file may have been corrupted while uploading to the server. But I re-uploaded it and continued to run into the same problem. I am currently using EEv1.6.1.

    Thanks for your help!

  25. 25 Adam December 21st 2007, 08:06

    Oops! I accidentally named the subfolder in my modules folder “askimet” instead of “akismet”!

    The renaming fixed it!

  26. 26 Alex January 4th 2008, 13:43

    Just installed this without any apparent problems but the test: viagra-test-123 wasn’t stopped. What do you think might be the problem?

  27. 27 Alex January 4th 2008, 13:56

    My test obviously wasn’t sophisticated enough. Seems to work fine. Thanks so much for this.

  28. 28 Ian Pitts June 28th 2008, 17:10

    Is this compatible with the Multi Site Manager?

  29. 29 Low June 28th 2008, 17:45

    It is, Ian. Although all caught comments will be put together, irrespective of which site they belong to.

  30. 30 Ian Pitts June 28th 2008, 18:29

    That’s perfect! Thanks again!

  31. 31 mel August 17th 2008, 15:30

    thank you! Another fantastic add-on for EE and it was super easy to setup! Thanks so much Low!

  32. 32 Eric September 23rd 2008, 07:21

    Any update as to when this will also work in the EE gallery? I’ve been getting hammered lately.

  33. 33 Tamalita January 4th 2009, 02:50

    awesome!

  34. 34 J.T. February 24th 2009, 08:31

    Many thanks for this - for some reason I was being completely deluged by comment spam, and after only just installing your plugin, it seems to be working already. What a savior, let me tell you!

    Cheers,
    J.T.

  35. 35 f055 April 20th 2009, 22:25

    First of all, thanks for the awesome plugin/module! It saved me a lot of work!

    However, I noticed a BUG: when I had a lot comments in the Akismet module waiting list (around 1K) I wasn’t able to checkbox them all and delete at once. I was able to do it one by one, but that’s lengthy. I had to remove them directly from the DB.

  36. 36 Low April 21st 2009, 12:29

    @f055: yeah, that’s because for each comment, the module has to send the info to the service. If you have a lot of comments, that will cause a timeout. I’ll see if I can add pagination to Low NoSpam to prevent this from happening. For now, use the native EE routines for deleting comments when you need to delete a lot. That won’t send them to Akismet, but won’t cause timeouts either.

  37. 37 Davor May 26th 2009, 17:44

    Hi, today I noticed that askimet was not working for a while for me, using the latest EE version 167, when comment was posted it returns error template page but not with error, so I didnt knew what could be, so I disabled the askimet and now is working. I dont know how to check to see if there is some extension uncompatibility or something else.

    thanx Low

  38. 38 Low May 26th 2009, 17:48

    @Davor: I recommend upgrading to Low NoSpam. You can use your old api-key, but you could also try the TypePad AntiSpam service.

  39. 39 davor May 26th 2009, 18:20

    thanx, I forgot to ask if I can use that new extension. thanx. keep the great work!

  40. 40 Jonathan June 5th 2009, 21:18

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     http://adwido.com

  41. 41 Ronny Shenik June 26th 2009, 19:29

    I unzipped in another folder, and everything is there. I have it set to remove duplicate files, so it’s possible that it thought they were the same for some reason.

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