If you publish a Wordpress self hosted blog eventually the comment spammers will find you. Comment from spammers is pretty easy to spot. The comments are brief, generic, and often off topic. Most will contain links to sites selling things that you don’t want to be a part of. The longer your blog is out there the more spammers will find you and the more fake comments will come in that you have to deal with. This can be quite time consuming. Thankfully Wordpress ships with spam protection built in with the plugin “Akismet.”
But I know many artists who use Wordpress never get around to activating Akismet because they get confused when it asks for a Wordpress.com API key.
What is a Wordpress.com API key and how do I get one?
Basically the API key allows your blog access to Akismet’s service to check if the comments appear to be spam or not. There are two simple ways to get your key. You can go to Wordpress.com and sign up for a username only account or you can go directly to Akismet’s site and have them email you a key.
Does not really matter which route you take, they are both very simple. But I highly recommend that you do take this step of getting that Akismet plugin activated. It will save you a lot of time by weeding out the real comments from the ugly comments.
