Using Akismet/TypePad AntiSpam with Django's new comments framework

I've just recently started getting lots of spam in my comments. I was originally using a custom OpenID-enabled commenting app that I had written, but decided to switch to the new Django commenting system since it looked interesting. The honeypot doesn't seem to be working though, because spam's still getting through...

Although django-comment-utils provides similar functionality, it hasn't yet been updated to use the new django.contrib.comments. For those of you that are interested, here's how you can use Akismet to protect your blog.

UPDATE: TypePad's AntiSpam service is 100% API compatible with Akismet, so the code below works nicely with it as well.

AKISMET_API_KEY = 'your-key-here'

If you'd rather use TypePad's AntiSpam service, paste instead the following:

TYPEPAD_ANTISPAM_API_KEY = 'your-key-here'

Download the Python Akismet module and put akismet.py somewhere on your PYTHONPATH.

Now paste the following code into any file that gets imported from your Django project. I'm using my own custom blog app, so this went at the end of my blog's models.py file.

from django.contrib.comments.signals import comment_was_posted

def on_comment_was_posted(sender, comment, request, *args, **kwargs):
    # spam checking can be enabled/disabled per the comment's target Model
    #if comment.content_type.model_class() != Entry:
    #    return

    from django.contrib.sites.models import Site
    from django.conf import settings

    try:
        from akismet import Akismet
    except:
        return

    # use TypePad's AntiSpam if the key is specified in settings.py
    if hasattr(settings, 'TYPEPAD_ANTISPAM_API_KEY'):
        ak = Akismet(
            key=settings.TYPEPAD_ANTISPAM_API_KEY,
            blog_url='http://%s/' % Site.objects.get(pk=settings.SITE_ID).domain
        )
        ak.baseurl = 'api.antispam.typepad.com/1.1/'
    else:
        ak = Akismet(
            key=settings.AKISMET_API_KEY,
            blog_url='http://%s/' % Site.objects.get(pk=settings.SITE_ID).domain
        )

    if ak.verify_key():
        data = {
            'user_ip': request.META.get('REMOTE_ADDR', '127.0.0.1'),
            'user_agent': request.META.get('HTTP_USER_AGENT', ''),
            'referrer': request.META.get('HTTP_REFERER', ''),
            'comment_type': 'comment',
            'comment_author': comment.user_name.encode('utf-8'),
        }

        if ak.comment_check(comment.comment.encode('utf-8'), data=data, build_data=True):
            comment.flags.create(
                user=comment.content_object.author,
                flag='spam'
            )
            comment.is_public = False
            comment.save()

comment_was_posted.connect(on_comment_was_posted)

This code can be tweaked to delete the comment outright if Akismet or TypePad detects that it's spam - connect instead to the comment_will_be_posted signal and return False. The flag is created so that a script can go through and periodically delete all spam.

Thanks to Coulix.net for the original implementation.

UPDATE: Fixed encoding issues when sending data to Akismet. UPDATE #2: TypePad AntiSpam support.