Rakismet
========

Akismet [http://akismet.com/] is a collaborative spam filtering service.
Rakismet is easy Akismet integration with your Rails app.


Setup
=====

Install with script/plugin install git://github.com/jfrench/rakismet

To get up and running with Rakismet, you'll need an API key from the folks at
WordPress. Head on over to http://wordpress.com/api-keys/ and sign up for a
new username.

Rakismet installation should have created a file called rakismet.rb in
config/initializers. Add your WordPress key and the front page or home URL of
your app. Rakismet::URL must be a fully qualified URI including the http://.

If that file is missing, create it and add the following:

  Rakismet::KEY  = 'your key from WordPress'
  Rakismet::URL  = 'http://base url for your application/'
  Rakismet::HOST = 'rest.akismet.com'

The Rakismet host can be changed if you wish to use another Akismet-compatible
API provider such as TypePad's antispam service.

Now introduce Rakismet to your application. Let's assume you have a Comment
model and a CommentsController:

  class Comment < ActiveRecord::Base
    has_rakismet
  end

  class CommentsController < ActionController::Base
    has_rakismet
  end


Model Requirements
==================

Rakismet sends the following information to the spam-hungry robots at Akismet.
This means these attributes should be stored in your Comment model or
accessible through that class's associations.

  author        : name submitted with the comment
  author_url    : URL submitted with the comment
  author_email  : email submitted with the comment
  comment_type  : 'comment', 'trackback', 'pingback', or whatever you fancy
  content       : the content submitted
  permalink     : the permanent URL for the entry the comment belongs to
  user_ip       : IP address used to submit this comment
  user_agent    : user agent string
  referrer      : http referer

user_ip, user_agent, and referrer are optional; you don't have to store them,
but it's a good idea. If you omit them from your model (see "Customizing
Attributes"), the +spam?+ method will attempt to extract these values from the
current request object, if there is one. This means Rakismet can operate
asynchronously by storing the request attributes and validating the comment at
a later time. Or it can operate synchronously by plucking the request
attributes from the environment at the time the comment is initially submitted
and validating on the spot. The latter could work well with a before_create
callback.


Basic Usage
===========

Rakismet provides three methods for interacting with Akismet:

  spam?

From within a CommentsController action, simply call @comment.spam? to get a
true/false response. True means it's spam, false means it's not. Well,
usually; it's possible something went wrong and Akismet returned an error
message. @comment.spam? will return false if this happens. You can check
@comment.akismet_response to be certain; anything other than 'true' or 'false'
means you got an error. That said, as long as you're collecting the data
listed above it's probably sufficient to check spam? alone.

  ham! and spam!

Akismet works best with your feedback. If you spot a comment that was
erroneously marked as spam, @comment.ham! will resubmit to Akismet, marked as
a false positive. Likewise if they missed a spammy comment, @comment.spam!
will resubmit marked as spam.


Customizing Attributes
======================

If your attribute names don't match those listed above, or if some of them
live on other objects, you pass has_rakismet a hash mapping the default 
attributes to your own. You can change the names, if your comment attributes
don't match the defaults:

  class Comment < ActiveRecord::Base
    has_rakismet :author => :commenter_name,
                 :author_email => :commenter_email
  end

Or you can pass in a proc, to access associations:

  class Comment < ActiveRecord::Base
    belongs_to :author
    has_rakismet :author => proc { author.name },
                 :author_email => proc { author.email }
  end

For any attribute you don't specify, Rakismet will try to find an attribute or 
method matching the default name. As mentioned above, if user_ip, user_agent,
and referrer are not present on your model, Rakismet will attempt to find them
in the request environment when +spam?+ is called from within a Rakismet-aware
controller action.

Controller Behavior
===================

Most of the time you won't be checking for spam on every action defined in
your controller. If you only call +spam?+ within CommentsController#create and
you'd like to reduce filter overhead, has_rakismet takes :only and :except
parameters that work like the standard before/around/after filter options.

  class CommentsController < ActionController::Base
    has_rakismet :only => :create
  end


==============================================================
Copyright (c) 2008 Josh French, released under the MIT license