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/'

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

1. These last 3 fields don’t need to be defined ##
2. if you’re not storing them in the database. ## user_ip : IP address used to submit this comment user_agent : user agent string referrer : http referer

user_ip, user_agent, and referer are optional; you don’t have to store them, but it’s a good idea. If you omit them from the Rakismet definition (see “Customizing Attributes” below), the spam? method will look around in your request environment and find them there. This means that Rakismet is meant to be used in a synchronous fashion—validating comments as they are submitted by the user, not placed in a queue for later spam-checking.

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, you can explicitly map user_ip, user_agent, and referer here or omit them. If you leave them out, Rakismet will look for them in the request environment when you call spam?.

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© 2008 Josh French, released under the MIT license

NOTE: This description has been extracted from the Plugin README and so the formatting may need updating to make browser friendly