Akismet

By Automattic (http://automattic.com/)

• Why it's awesome: Virtually eliminates spam on blog comments

• Why it was picked: Popularity and accuracy

• Manual Install URL: http://WordPress.org/extend/plugins/akismet/

• Automatic Install search term: Akismet

• Geek level: Webmaster

• Configuration location: Settings | Secure WP

• Used in: Administrator

With WordPress, there is one thing you can always guarantee—lots of fake comments submitted by bots. Spam bots are nasty little programs that scour the web hunting for WordPress blogs to automatically submit comments to. Why do they do this? Because spamming comments is a really easy way to spread a website's URL to other websites.

Akismet, pronounced Ah-kiz-met, is a service provided by the original team who created WordPress-Automattic. This service scans each comment against a growing database of known spammers as well as evaluates the content of the comment for patterns that resemble spam.

In order to leverage this awesome plugin, you will need...