A Python interface to the Akismet spam-filtering service.


Keywords
akismet, spam, spam-filtering, akismet-client, python, spam-detection, spam-prevention
License
BSD-3-Clause
Install
pip install akismet==1.3

Documentation

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A Python interface to the Akismet spam-filtering service.

Two API clients are available from this library:

  • akismet.SyncClient is an Akismet API client which performs synchronous (blocking) HTTP requests to the Akismet web service.
  • akismet.AsyncClient is an Akismet API client which performs asynchronous (async/await/non-blocking) HTTP requests to the Akismet web service.

Aside from one being sync and the other async, the two clients expose identical APIs, and implement all methods of the Akismet web API, including the v1.2 key and API usage metrics.

To use this library, you will need to obtain an Akismet API key and register a site for use with the Akismet web service; you can do this at <https://akismet.com>. Once you have a key and corresponding registered site URL to use with it, place them in the environment variables PYTHON_AKISMET_API_KEY and PYTHON_AKISMET_BLOG_URL, and they will be automatically detected and used.

You can then construct a client instance and call its methods. For example, to check a submitted forum post for spam:

import akismet

akismet_client = akismet.SyncClient.validated_client()

if akismet_client.comment_check(
    user_ip=submitter_ip,
    comment_content=submitted_content,
    comment_type="forum-post",
    comment_author=submitter_name
):
    # This piece of content was classified as spam; handle it appropriately.

Or using the asynchronous client:

import akismet

akismet_client = await akismet.AsyncClient.validated_client()

if await akismet_client.comment_check(
    user_ip=submitter_ip,
    comment_content=submitted_content,
    comment_type="forum-post",
    comment_author=submitter_name
):
    # This piece of content was classified as spam; handle it appropriately.

Note that in both cases the client instance is created via the alternate constructor validated_client(). This is recommended instead of using the default constructor (i.e., directly calling akismet.SyncClient() or akismet.AsyncClient()); the validated_client() constructor will perform automatic discovery of the environment-variable configuration and validate the configuration with the Akismet web service before returning the client, while directly constructing an instance will not (so if you do directly construct an instance, you must manually provide and validate its configuration).

See the documentation for full details.

The original version of this library was written by Michael Foord.