Welcome,
We will here learn to activate and protect our wordpress blog from comment and trackback spam. We will use the popular Akismet plugin.
After installing wordpress you automatically get a notice about the available Akismet-plugin under the Plugins-menu and the possibility to upgrade to the latest version of Akismet. Let’s do that.
You can update Akismet-plugin either by clicking the “update now” or do it manually, we will do the latter.
“Update now” will open this dialog:
However, I will not do the update this way but rather prefer to do it manually…
Manually updating the akismet-plugin:
root@ubuntu01:/usr/src/download# wget https://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/akismet.3.1.2.zip
install unzip if you don’t have it installed already.
root@ubuntu01:/usr/src/download# apt-get install unzip
Unpack
root@ubuntu01:/usr/src/download# unzip akismet.3.1.2.zip
Set the same owner and group that you have for the wordpress folder.
root@ubuntu01:/usr/src/download# chown -R nobody:www-data ./akismet
move the old akismet plugin away or delete it. I’m moving it to the download folder here and call it akismet_old
root@ubuntu01:/usr/src/download# mv /var/www/creang/wp-content/plugins/akismet/ ./akismet_old
Move the new updated folder in place
root@ubuntu01:/usr/src/download# mv akismet /var/www/creang/wp-content/plugins/
Now when the plugin is in place, Activate the plugin by clicking “Activate”
Follow the instructions:
Get your API key…
Signing up for Akismet with wordpress.com…
Choose your plan, I chose the basic plan here…
Choose wether you want to donate an annual amount or not…
Pulling the slider to $0 makes the payment info disappear…
After clicking the continue button…
click to automatically save your api key…
All done!
Now, let’s see what happens when a comment is made:
“Your comment is awaiting moderation”
This comment can be taken care of by the admin/moderator under the comments section…