n this video, we’re going to take a look at how to control spam on your WordPress blog using the Akismet WordPress plugin. Now, Akismet is a default WordPress plugin that should appear in your dashboard the moment you have installed WordPress. So this is Akismet, and if it is not available in your WordPress dashboard, then you can always search for Akismet and download all, install it all automatically via WordPress dashboard.
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So first of all, I’m going to click on Activate to activate Akismet. Okay, so Akismet has been activated, but there is one final step for you to do, which is to enter your WordPress.com API key. And here, you’ll find some description about Akismet and what it does, and then right here I need to enter the WordPress.com API key. So you can either click on Get Your Key, or you can just go to WordPress.com.
Now, somewhere on this screen, probably to the right, you will see the link that says Find Out Now. So if you don’t already have a WordPress.com account, then you can just click on Sign Up Now to get started.
So the first thing you need to do is give yourself a username, password, and confirmation of that password. And once you’ve done that, you’d see how strong your password is, so you can always make it stronger if you want to, but generally if the password strength is good, then you’re good to go. And then enter your email address over here, and then you may want to take a look at their Terms of Service, and when you’ve done that, then you can click on “I have read and agree to the fascinating Terms of Service†and finally, there’s an option to either get a blog – for example, username.wordpress.com, or just a WordPress username.
So if you don’t plan on starting a free blog at WordPress.com, you can just click on “Just a username, please.†Of course, once you already have a WordPress.com username, you can always create as many blogs as you want later on. And then click on Next.
So once you’ve registered your WordPress.com username, then you should check your GMail account for a confirmation link. Now, it’s important that you activate your account with this confirmation link to be able to log into WordPress.com. Once you’ve done that, then you can actually go to WordPress.com, put in your username and your password, and click on Log In. Now once you’ve logged in and assuming, of course, you only requested for a WordPress.com username, then you can also click on this link to register a blog, but mostly, you can just go to My Account and click on Edit Profile.
Right on top of the profile page, you should be able to see your WordPress.com API key, and it says here, “Don’t share your API key; it’s like a password.†So it’s important that you do not share this with anyone. Right now, I’m just going to copy the API key, and then I’m gonna go back to my WordPress blog dashboard. I’m gonna paste the API key in here. Now, if your blog has already been around for a while, and you may already have some spam comments, so you may want to also click on “Automatically discard spam comments on posts older than a month.†And click on “Update options.†And now you can see that the options have been saved. So if you scroll down here, you’d be able to check if the Akismet servers are working, or if they’re currently experiencing some kind of issue. But generally speaking, Akismet servers are dependable and should be working all the time.
So that’s how you install and configure Akismet to work on your WordPress blog.