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Akismet, the most popular WordPress anti-spam plugin, has launched a parter program geared toward developers who urge the use of Akismet among their larger clients.

Akismet is free for most users, but sites which make a substantial amount of income on their own are asked to pay a small amount for the service. Given that most of these sites are built by third-party developers, designer, or consultants, the program is designed to share a percentage of the purchase with the referring individual if the referred user chooses to sign up with a paid Akismet plan.

The program is open to applicants, so feel free to apply for registration now. And, if you have never used Akismet, today’s the perfect day to start.

When Akismet 2.5.2 was released, Joseph Scott mentioned that the team was working on something special that had not been changed since 2008. Yesterday, the Akismet team announced that the previous method of using Flash to generate the charts has disappeared. Instead, the graphs are now generated by something called flot.js which is an open source chart library built on jQuery.

New Graphs In Akismet

Using Flot.js gives the team more flexibility in determining how stats are displayed. The stats page also loads faster but the biggest improvement this new approach has is that any device that supports Javascript will be able to view the graphs.

Joseph Scott who is working on the Akismet plugin for WordPress notified everyone via the WordPress core development blog that there would be some changes coming to Akismet, starting with version 2.5. In version 2.5 of the plugin, there will be some new files added such as admin.php, akismet,css, akismet.js, and widget.php. There will also be a test mode included with 2.5 which can be activated when WP-DEBUG is set to TRUE or when AKISMET_TEST_MODE is set to TRUE. When test mode is enabled, comments marked as spam will not be sent back to the Akismet servers for learning. There will now be a spam check history section where each comment and interaction that occurs with Akismet will be displayed. Each comment will also have an indication as to what Akismet did with the comment.

There are a number of other improvements as well mentioned in the blog post. Anything you see that perks your interest?

Akismet was one of Automattic’s first projects, and after 5 years of sporting the same design, the entire site has received a major facelift.

On first glance, the new site presents Akismet’s benefits in a much clearer way, and offers clearer distinction between the free and paid licenses. Fans of the old spam stats will probably notice that they are no longer featured on the front page, but fear not, they have just been moved to the About page.

Akismet’s anti-spam offerings have continue to grow dramatically over the last 5 years. What began as a single WordPress plugin is now available in 24 plugins and 14 libraries.

What do you think of Akismet’s redesign? Do you use Akismet on your blog? If not, how do you protect your blog from spam?

So, you’ve got WordPress, Akismet, and more spam comments than you can keep track of. Wouldn’t you like to know which posts are drawing the most spam attention? Well, Ozh has the perfect script for you!

Update: The script is now a plugin.

Simply upload the script to your WordPress root directory and enjoy a listing of your most prominent spam magnets, complete with “a pretty interactive pie chart.” Use the script to track down and close off your spam magnets, research the keywords catching the spammers’ attention, or just do it for fun.

When I ran this script on my blog, I found two spam magnets that shouldn’t have had open comments in the first place, and all of my posts mentioning the WordPress Support Forums were drawing the most attention from spammers.

Here are the results from Weblog Tools Collection (spam comments are deleted on a regular basis, so this only includes the most recent spam comments):

• 404 - Should You Remove Post Dates from Your WordPress Blog
• 161 - WordPress Support Forum All-stars
• 114 - WordPress and the Fatal Memory Error
• 110 - Lorelle’s Mind Blowing WordPress Plugins
• 101 - WordPress Mobile Apps for Android and BlackBerry Updated
• 100 - WordPress Theme Releases for 08/26
• 82 - WordPress Theme Releases for 08/30
• 69 - 300,000 Biggest Websites, Visualized With Their Icons
• 66 - WordPress Plugin Releases for 09/05
• 61 - WordPress Plugin Releases for 08/28

What did you find?

If you run a social network or any kind of online publishing service, you will be hit by spam, if you haven’t been hit already, and Akismet wants to help.

When most people hear about Akismet, they often think about WordPress, but Akismet is actually available for over twenty additional systems and platforms, including Movable Type, Drupal, phpBB, PunBB, and libraries for PHP, Python, and .NET.

If you’re running, or planning to run, a social network or online publishing service, the Akismet team wants you to know that they can not only protect you from direct spam, but from parasite spam as well, as long as you can give them a way to contact you.

Akismet’s pattern and volume monitoring abilities make direct spam easy to filter, but ever since the dawn of forums, spammers have opened accounts for the sole purpose hosting their spam on your site. Thanks to Akismet’s pattern monitoring, the Akismet team can easily track the source of these parasite spammers and notify the site’s owner, but there’s little they can do if they can’t get in touch with you. Since contact forms can break without warning, the Akismet team recommends that you provide a traditional abuse@yourdomain email address. If you don’t want to make this email address public, at least contact Akismet and have it placed on file.

Are you using Akismet on your social network or online publishing service? With so many options available, why not try it today? Parasite spam can hit almost any site driven by user content, so don’t forget to offer your contact information to the Akismet team.