I’m very proud to announce we have a new version of the Akismet for WordPress based on all your feedback over the past year. Here’s a summary of what’s new:
- Instead of just viewing the last 150 comments, you can now page through everything caught by Akismet.
- There was a performance bug which could cause the old plugin to be pretty hard on the DB when getting a ton of spam, now it doesn’t.
- You can now search the Akismet caught queue.
- Longer timeout so it’s less likely to let spam through if you have a free key and the load is high. (With a paid key you always are in the priority queue.)
- The counters now update properly when you clear things out.
- A recheck moderation queue page on the WP moderation page to re‑submit things in your moderation queue, so if gosh forbid Akismet ever were to go down you could have it recheck all your comments later.
- A new counter widget you can put in your sidebar to show a live count of your spam, see an example on my site.
- It kills the open_proxy_check option in WordPress 2.0 that causes false positives.
- You can hardcode your API key in the plugin file to hide the configuration page and enable Akismet as a mu‑plugin for WordPress MU.
- If Akismet is unable to contact the mothership, it now has much friendlier debug messages.
- And finally my favorite, you can now tell Akismet to discard spam that comes in on entries older than a month. (On the Akismet configuration page under Plugins.)
Whew! That’s a lot.
A little more on that last one. When I was doing some research into false positives I found an interesting statistic: the overwhelming majority (more that 99.99%) of false positives (which is when Akismet marks someone as spam wrongly) occur on new posts. Which makes sense because most real comments happen on new entries.
Before I started to use this option, I used to have tens of thousands of comments in my Akismet caught spam queue every day, and now it’s only a dozen or two and is easy to scan to look for the rare mistake. You can download the new Akismet plugin here.
Akismet 
Great stuff, guys.
Will Akismet 2.0 be bundled with WP 2.1?
Thanks. Works perfect on wp 2.1 RC2 !
Wow, great news!
Looks like you forgot to change version on download page. It tells “The latest version of the plugin is 1.2.1.” now.
Excellent, thank you for the heads-up. I’ve tried Bad Behavior and got blocked from my own site, I’ve tried Spam Karma 2 and got false positives… but I’ve had zero problems with Akismet from the beginning.
It’s a godsend for bloggers.
You really have a fantastic plugin, thanks for the new version 🙂
wow u all great n mavellous… 🙂
Good job,thanks but changing the output of the akismet counter was really necessary?
AKismet is great but I think it could do more. If you want to get rid a problem, get rid of the source. AKismet is not helping preventing spam from happening, it is just playing garbage man… for now.
http://www.ihad.de/2007/01/28/wp-ban-and-akismet/
Joomla AND WordPress, sweet
AKismet is a great plugin, yet combined with WP-Ban it could be even more effective and actually prevent spam from happening at all.
I noticed today that Blogger is attacking spammers by showing their ‘post comment’ form in an SSL page. If you guys would like to comment on Google’s ‘throw the kitchen sink’ at the spam problem, I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts.
We used to require SSL on wordpress.com, it made no difference.