If you have downloaded WordPress 2.1, you already have the new Akismet plugin, but for everyone else, it is time to download and activate a new version of Akismet, one with some new features.

  • 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 Photomatt.net.
  • 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.)

Check out the Akismet development blog for more details, and grab Akismet 2.0 from their download page.

Let’s hope it continues to get better and better. Thumbs up to the Automattic team for pushing out this new release.

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