Spam bots halted with Akismet

by Andre Engelbrecht

akismet django python

Up until the start of this week, I was not really concerned about spam bots finding my site. In my naivity, I believed that my site is small enough to go completely un-noticed by them. I also thought that should any bot find my site, they still have to get past the django forms honeypot.

A couple of days ago, I found that I was very wrong. Luckilly I caught it early, and quickly disabled comments on by blogs and videos, and deleted the spam. Next my search started for a solution. I read up on Django's comment moderation, and thought that I would implement that. The problem of course was that the spam would still be coming in, and I'd still have to Remove/Approve the comments, which would take up far too much of my time.

I jumped into a couple IRC channels on Freenode, and asked the people what their preferred spam protection is in Django, and there were two that was recommended to me, Akismet and re-Captcha. I'm familiar with re-Captcha, and thought I'd just go with that solution, but something inside me said to try Akismet as well.

I started with Akismet, and found this great blog, showling how to integrate Akismet with django. One hour later, and had my Akismet API key, and had fully integrated it into my website.

Comments are enabled again, on most of my blogentries, and now we will just wait and see if the spam bots get through.

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