The other week The Register wrote an article, which talked about the Indieweb, and Webmentions in particular.

The article covered a bunch of things, but highlighted the potential spam issue with webmention, which I’ve been meaning to do something about in Known for a while. Since Known was mentioned right at the end of the article, I figured I should probably pull my finger out.

So, while the community build a better way of handling spammy comments and webmentions (e.g. Vouch, or similar graph based filter), I put together a very quick Akismet plugin. Obviously this is centralisation / single point of failure, but it’s a quick fix that’ll hopefully stop the worst of the problems while we build something better.

Usage

Install in the normal way, and activate with your wordpress API key.

Now, all new annotations (including comments and webmentions) will be passed through akismet before being posted. Note, the entire thing requires you to be running a version of Known with the annotation/save event hook added by this pull request.

Enjoy.

» Visit the project on Github...