Anti-spam plugins

This should completely eliminate spambots for sure.

Nope, they’re readable by the bots and it just annoys those who have vsiion issues or those who sit behind broken proxies like Comcast clients.

Bad Behavior does an excellent job, however it’s not a cure all. It should be used in combination with something like Akismet.

To use Akismet, I will need to create a wordpress account, even if I host wordpress blogs on my own domains, just so I can get an API key. https://wordpress.com/api-keys

Thanks,
Fred

That’s true…. is that a problem for some reason? You can simply create a “user account” to get the key, without creating a blog….

I created a wordpress account and got a key. I assume my password is the key?

I however encountered a new problem. When I attempted to enter the key into akismet.php in my Plugin Editor, in the following field $wpcom_api_key = ”; and Updated file, the following error occurred:

“Fatal error: Call to undefined function: wp_cache_get() in /home/beyourowndetective/blog/wp-content/plugins/akismet.php on line 264”

I was able to reproduce this exact same error by attempting to Update file after making no changes to akismet.php. There appears to be a bug in akismet.php. I reuploaded a fresh copy of the plugin but that didn’t help.

Fred

Alternatively you could just use Spam Karma 2 in conjunction with Bad Behavior – that gets about 99.8% of all my spam.

[sig moderated]

I still need to figure out what’s causing the error. It seems akismet.php cannot accept the key. I tried a work-around, entering the key after deactivating the plugin, then activating akismet.php, but that not only immediately generated the error again, it completely froze up my entire blog. I was then forced to manually delete akismet.php from my FTP-client, just to get my blog back online.

It seems akismet.php cannot accept the key.

that’s because your key isn’t your password.

Go to wordpress.com and log into your account. In the top left corner, you can access your “my account” area – in that area you’ll get your key.

Yes, I later found that out. I found the API key and when I tried that, the same error still occurs.

More likely a problem with wp_cache. Some particular reason you’re using it?

I don’t have the wp_cache plugin installed. Maybe akismet requires it on some web servers?

I asked my webhost about this. Here is their reply:

“Hi Fred,

I cannot see any technical reason why it wouldn’t function.

The error: Fatal error: Call to undefined function: wp_cache_get()
however means that the script cannot even find the function. So there is definitely a configurational or some other error in your script or implementation of wordpress or akismet.

Essentially your akismet.php script is trying to call a function wp_cache_get which should be defined somewhere in your code and included in the akismet.php file, it cannot find that function.

Thanks,

Webstrike Solutions
https://www.webstrikesolutions.com
[email protected]”

Hmmm. What version of wp is this?

You might be shocked to know it’s a really old version – 1.5.1.3.

I have been reluctant to upgrade, since I earlier had a bad experience with upgrade attempt of WP. At the time, I could not get it to reestablish the database connection. I was finally forced to completely rebuild the database from scratch. It seems MySQL databases can be extremely fickle and prone to trouble in these situations.

You might be shocked to know it’s a really old version – 1.5.1.3.

Not really. That’s your problem. Most plugins only work with newer versions of WordPress. 2.0 and up, generally. Akismet is no exception.

I would like to upgrade WP, but can it be done seemlessly without the database becoming corrupted like it did last time? I remember how the database tables were the root of the problem.