Using Akismet

Akismet is a comment spam prevention service which can be used by websites to automatically classify a comment as safe or as spam. It is a commercial service with a free option for personal websites. Refer to the Pricing & Sign Up page at https://akismet.com/signup/ for more details.

To enable Akismet on your WeBlog site:

1. Sign up with Akismet and receive your API key.
2. Enter your Akismet API key in the WeBlog.Akismet.APIKey Sitecore setting. An empty setting exists in the configuration file App_Config\Include\WeBlog.Comments.Handler.config as reference.
3. It is recommended not to add you key directly to the App_Config\Include\WeBlog.Comments.Handler.config file but instead create a configuration patch file and add the key there.
4. Ensure the Enable Comments field on the blog home item is ticked.
5. Ensure the Sitecore.Modules.WeBlog.Pipelines.CreateComment.AkismetSpamCheck processor is present in the weblogCreateComment pipeline.
6. The weblogCreateComment pipeline is defined in the App_Config\Include\WeBlog.Comments.Handler.config configuration patch file.

During the comment creation process the weblogCreateComment pipeline is executed and the Sitecore.Modules.WeBlog.Pipelines.CreateComment.AkismetSpamCheck processor run. This processor will check the comment against Akismet and if the comment is classified as spam the workflow command given by the Sitecore setting WeBlog.Comments.Workflow.Command.Spam is executed. In a default implementation this will execute the Spam command on the Created state of the WeBlog Comments workflow which will move the comment to the Spam workflow state.

The simplest way to review spam comments is to use the workbox which will show all the spam comments in the spam state.