Discourse is great, but spam can be a problem. Akismet is a well known service that has an algorithm for detecting spam. Akismet is NOT free for commerical use, but can be for personal use. To use this plugin you will need an Akismet API key. You can get a key by starting out here.
The plugin works by collecting info about a new post's http request. Every 10 minutes a background jobs run which looks for posts to submit. All new posts are sent to Akismet to determine if they are spam or not. If a post is deemed spam, it is deleted and placed in a moderator queue where admins can take action against it. An admin can do the following:
| Action | Result |
|---|---|
| Confirm | confirms the post as spam, leaving it deleted |
| Allow | Akismet thought something was spam but it wasn't. This undeletes the post and tells Akismet that it wasn't spam. Akismet gets smarter so it hopefully won't make the same mistake twice. |
| Delete user | The nuclear option. It will delete the user and all their posts and topics and block their email and ip address. |
| Field Name | Discourse Value |
|---|---|
| Author | User's Name |
| Author Email | User's verified email (can be disabled with the akismet_transmit_email site setting) |
| Comment Type | "forum-post" |
| Content | Post's raw column |
| Permalink | Link to topic |
| User IP | IP address of request |
| User Agent | User agent of request |
| Referrer | HTTP referer of request |
Just follow our Install a Plugin howto, using
git clone https://github.com/discourse/discourse-akismet.git as the plugin command.
Once you've installed it make sure to add your akismet key under site settings. You can also add it
using a DISCOURSE_AKISMET_API_KEY environment variable.
Also make sure to enable the akismet_enabled site setting.
Do the following
cd plugins
git clone https://github.com/verdi327/akismet.git
Once Discourse starts up make sure you enter your akismet_api_key under site settings.
Once you have the plugin installed, let's do a quick test to make sure everything is working. Login as a non admin user and create a new topic and post. Use the following info.
title: Spam test - Will this plugin do what it says!
post: love vashikaran, love vashikaran specialist,919828891153 love vashikaran special black magic specialist hurry hurry love now
Now, go to /sidekiq/scheduler and find the CheckForSpamPosts jobs and trigger it. Now, as an admin, go to /admin and look for the tab that says Akismet in the menu bar. Upon clicking you should see the post with some additional info about it.
Help make this plugin better by submitting a PR. It's as easy as 1-2-3
- fork the repo
- create a feature branch
- rebase off master and send the pr
This project uses MIT-LICENSE.
If you want to notify Hipchat when spam is found, consider installing the discourse-akismet-hipchat as well!
The original plugin was authored by Michael Verdi (@verdi327) for use at New Relic. It has since been forked and refactored by Robin Ward (@eviltrout) at Discourse.