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How to Activate Askimet

As bloggers and internet marketers, we just don’t have enough time in a day to get everything done that needs to get done. Don’t you agree? For those of you who want to make money blogging, and perhaps make it your full time job, I’m sure the last thing you want to do is waste time.  And what could be more useless and annoying than deleting 500 spam comments in your moderation queue?

For those of you who are really new to the blogging game and haven’t experienced the hassles of spam let me explain a little. You have a blog and you are posting away and everything is hunk-dory. You’re not getting any traffic but it’s still hunky-dory. Then, one day you see an alert in your email that says you need to moderate some comments on your blog.

You get all excited because finally someone has left a comment on your blog! Your eyes glaze over as your taste true success for the first time ever online. As you make your way to your blog you imagine how once it takes off, you’ll be at the beach just hanging and blogging. Living the good life…

You get to your blog and go to the admin panel to check your comments. You have 500 comments!! “What’s going on here?” you think to yourself. Upon closer inspection you see that almost all of the comments are total spam. Just tons of links and nonsensical gibberish. Of course whenever this happens there are always a few ‘non spam’ comments mixed in. So this means you have to go through all the comments one by one and delete about 495 of them!

Talk about a waste of time. This is when you really learn to appreciate Askimet. Askimet is your anti spam tool for WordPress blogs. Some folks have a little trouble activating Askimet because you need and api key from WordPress. No worries, it’s a piece of cake!

First of all you need an account with WordPress. That’s free and easy. Then:

  1. If you don’t already have it in your admin panel when you install WordPress then like any plugin, you simply upload it via ftp to your server.  Just navigate first to your public_html folder. Then from there go to the wp_content folder.  Finally you’ll see the ‘plugins’ folder. Naturally, that’s the one you upload your plugins to.
  2. Go to the plugins tab in your admin panel (top right next to settings) and activate the plugin by clicking ‘activate’
  3. You’re not finished yet. With many plugins this is all you need to do. That’s why WordPress is so cool. However with the Askimet pluing we need to do a few more things.  You’ll notice near the top of the page it says that Askimet is almost ready and you need your WordPress api key.
  4. Simply click the link and you should see your api key at the bottom of the page.
  5. Enter your api key into Askimet.

That’s it! Now you don’t need to spend time fooling with spam comments. Askimet will take anything that looks like spam and put it in a queue for a few days then delete it. Most spam comments have a number of links in them so they are easy for Askimet to spot. Although legit comments do sometimes get caught up with the rest.  If you aren’t using Askimet you probably should be.

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Friday, September 19th, 2008 at 12:38 am and is filed under WordPress Tips . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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