I found this article on Soaked and Soaped on protecting against spam with Akismet. It’s a pretty standard introduction to David Czarnecki’s ruby Akismet lib (the same one that Mephisto’s Akismet lib is derived from). I noticed he mentioned using an author of ‘viagra-test-123’ to test that Akismet was working. And, it wasn’t on this site, so I investigated further.

Apparently, Akismet started requiring the blog parameter sometime after I first integrated this support. David’s lib didn’t have it, so apparently Jordan Arentsen had to modify his to work. I did the same, while refactoring Mephisto a bit. Now, the comment_check method checks for a value of ‘true’ to approve a comment, instead of checking for a return that isn’t ‘false’. Had I checked that correctly, the broken Akismet lib would have marked all comments unapproved.

So, Akismet support should be working now. As a little bonus, the Approve/Unapprove links in the Comment Moderation Admin will make calls to Akismet to mark a comment as spam or ham. If Akismet steps out, correct it real quick, and remove the missed spam if needed.