Using the Akismet Add-on

Introduction

The official Gravity Forms Akismet Add-on provides a way to integrate your form with the Akismet service, allowing you to use that service to help identify suspicious or likely spam entries.

Description

Akismet is a spam filtering plugin for WordPress websites. It catches blog comments and pingback spam using its own algorithm and a broad collection of data collected from thousands of sources.

This algorithm learns from previous data and the actions taken by participating websites. For example, when a number of websites start reporting similar content as spam, Akismet will learn to identify this type of content as spam.

Akismet integration used to be part of Gravity Forms core but with the release of Gravity Forms, Akismet integration is now handled by the official Gravity Forms Akismet addon. Both integrations will work for the time being but the old method of integration will be phased out.

Prerequisites

To use the Akismet Add-On, you will require:

When all prerequisites are satisfied, a new Akismet page will be added to the Form Settings area of every form.

Setup Akismet

Refer to the Akismet Settings Reference article for a full list of add-on settings, and the Setting Up The Akismet Add-On for the process steps required to get up and running.

Marked As Spam

When Akismet marks an entry as spam the entry can still be found on the entries page, but it will be placed in the Spam category instead of Unread.

Screen Shot of Entry list page with option to mark spam

When you manually mark an entry as spam (by clicking the red Spam link as shown in the screenshot above) it will help train Akismet for similar entries moving forward. Akismet will take this information and uses it to improve its spam filtering process not only on your installation but across all websites. This help guide shows how to mark entries as spam.

Testing Akismet Forms

  • Entries submitted from a form preview will be processed by Akismet in test mode, which prevents those submissions from training the Akismet filters.
  • Embedded forms submitted by logged in users will send the user role to Akismet. Akismet does not mark submissions by administrators as spam.

Akismet Hooks

Gravity Forms includes two filters which can be used to customize the Akismet integration: