Do I still need a honeypot plugin to use in conjunction with Akismet?

Akismet uses honeypot fields when appropriate, so no, you don’t need a honeypot plugin in addition to Akismet.

Ok, thanks for your assistance. Where can I go for under-the-hood documentation?

@mcolorswporg due to the nature of our service, we don’t have full “under-the-hood” documentation. Otherwise, what we do have is our publicly available developer documentation:

https://akismet.com/development/api/#detailed-docs

I hope that helps!

Thanks for your reply. This looks like another case of the ‘secret ingredient in the chili recipe’ that can’t be revealed because it’s proprietary. Well, that’s ok. It’s just that there is a fine, fine line between what is secret and what needs to be ascertained by the Admin so that everything is covered in terms of other plugins that may compensate for what Akismet is not best at.

This looks like another case of the ‘secret ingredient in the chili recipe’ that can’t be revealed because it’s proprietary.

Not exactly. Spammers are always trying to find ways to circumvent our spam protection and having that information available publicly would render the service useless. We take spam fighting very seriously so if you have an issue with our service, we’re here to help.

Also, Akismet is always learning so every report from users of our service of anything missed helps improve our spam fighting service going forward for everyone.

Hope that clarifies things.

Akismet has a reputation as the best WordPress anti-spam plugin. Not everyone knows that it works with Contact Form 7 as well as blog comments.

Once you have activated the Akismet WordPress plugin and followed the on-screen instructions to add your API key (free for non-profit-making website, small monthly fee for business sites), you need to do a bit of extra config to make it talk to Contact Form 7 – see https://contactform7.com/spam-filtering-with-akismet/.

In my tests, Akismet stopped about 70% of the Contact Form 7 spam but not all of it. It worked well in conjunction with some of the other solutions mentioned in this article.