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.

Sign up at Wordpress to get your API key for Akismet. Paste it into your settings file: 

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.

Comments

  1. Fíam says...

    I suggest you to check my approach to spam blocking http://fi.am/entry/preventing-spam/ (doesn't require any external service). I went from more than 300 spam comments per day to 1 in three months.

  2. Fiam says...

    I received an unicode error after posting the comment, but it got recorded anyway. So I checked you code for sending the data to Akismet and I spotted two small errors: you must .encode('utf8') comment.user_name and comment.comment before putting them on the wire, othewise non-ascii data will raise an exception. On the other hand, set settings.DEBUG = False ;)

  3. Oscar says...

    Thanks! Now I don't have to figure out how to do this myself... :-D

    And btw, you need to skin your post preview :-)

  4. trbs says...

    related question, are the speed issue's with akismet solved already ?

    last time i tried to use akismet from a server in europe it easily took 10s to get an answer back from akismet. which is just too slow for any real usage...

  5. Samuel Cormier-Iijima says...

    Fíam: Thanks for pointing out those mistakes - I've updated the code to fix it. See, I leave debugging on so that readers like you can fix my code for me :-)

    trbs: I've just started using Akismet, but haven't really noticed any speed issues...

  6. Kyle says...

    Solid code, but I still don't like the idea of having to maintain and include a separate file just to get Akismet functionality. I really wish Akismet would get merged into the django.contrib.comments and operate on an opt-in basis (say, if AKISMET_API_KEY has been defined in setting.py).

    It just feels so un-djangolike to always be dropping in a script like this into all your projects...

  7. Julien Phalip says...

    Thanks a lot for sharing! Very useful and easy to set up.

  8. John says...

    Could you write a plugin for Mollom?

  9. Anil says...

    Hi, I only just saw your (very interesting!) work here, and wanted to see if you were interested in making it work with <a href="http://antispam.typepad.com/">TypePad AntiSpam</a>. It should be 100% API compatible with Akismet, but the engine is open source and the service is free no matter how many comments you get -- a good fit for high-demand Django sites. And there are a good number of Django fans at Six Apart anyway, so we'd be happy to see TypePad AntiSpam used in combination. :)

  10. Samuel Cormier-Iijima says...

    Anil: Thanks for pointing out AntiSpam - I had never heard of it before, but it looks really good. It's nice that AntiSpam is compatible with Akismet, so that akismet.py works with it as well. I've updated the code with a few simple changes to make it work with both depending on which key is specified in settings.py.

  11. Sofeng says...

    Any plans for using OpenID with Django's New Comments?

  12. Jens says...

    thanks for sharing your code. works well for me. is your script for deleting the spam comments also available?

  13. Stephane Daury says...

    I'm sure the crew would love to have you join in at MontrealPython4, On September 25th, if you're interested. http://montrealpython.org/?p=38

  14. Mike says...

    Hey, Fellow McGiller here... Great work, here and on chide.it. Would you drop me a line to meet on campus some time? Let's talk Django and Facebook and other interesting stuff...

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