BIG BIG UPDATE:
This plugin is no longer BETA! The location of the zip containing the plugin did not change so just redownload it if you’ve downloaded it before January 31st. Have fun!

If you are a wordpress blogger you probably know about Akismet, the new spam stop solution that Matt Mullenweg announced last week. It’s his try to prevent spam from ever appearing on all those wordpress blogs on this planet. WordPress.com already uses it and you can download it on akismet.com as a plugin for WordPress 1.5.2. All you need is a WordPress.com API key and for that you need a WordPress.com account and for that you need to download Flock (brrr, you know Flock sucks, but it gives you an API key … hurray!) and go to wordpress.com/flock with Flock and sign up. The API key is then located in the profile of your WordPress.com account. So this is a fairly complex way to get and use this super simple plugin of theirs.

Akismet works by sending all new comments to their servers and replying with “true” or “false” if the service thinks it’s spam or not. You can also manually mark comments as spam and recover spam comments (false positives) that are real comments. Both improves Akismet by reporting back the mistake.

While this is a nice approach I don’t like the idea of having only one service to check a comment against. I recently switched to Spam Karma 2 and am very happy with it. It never failed me and successfully sent nearly 900 comments to hell in the last 18 days. But nobody is perfect and checking against Akismet could make Spam Karma 2 even better.

Enter Spam Karma 2 Akismet Plugin :-) (beta test), an additional filter for my favourite spam prevention system (which also lists detected spam in a more readable way).

You can download the BETA (!!!) here: sk2_akismet_plugin.zip

Unzip it to your sk2_plugins directory and enter the above mentioned WordPress.com API key in the “General Settings” of this plugin plugin (a plugin in a plugin, sic!). You can finetune (set some boundaries) the plugin in the advanced settings, but the default values should work fine. Nevertheless I’d like feedback on that, too. And on everything else.

The plugin automatically submits detected spam and ham that Akismet got wrong back to Akismet.com which should make the service better with time (it already detects a lot of spam … 80% of all comments are spam they say … but more can’t hurt, right?).

Update:
- Changed some things in the text of this announcement.
- The plugin no longer submits all comments as spam/ham, only the ones where Akismet was wrong.
- Still BETA

Second Update:
- Uploaded a new version which fixes a bug mentioned by Matt in the comments
- Changed the picture to reflect the current version
- Still BETA though ;-)