Frequently asked questions¶
The following notes answer common questions, and may be useful to you
when using akismet
.
What versions of Python are supported?¶
The 1.0 release of akismet
supports the following versions
of Python:
- 2.7
- 3.3
- 3.4
- 3.5
- 3.6
Older versions of Python are not supported; attempting to use
akismet
1.0 on Python 2.6, or Python 3.0-3.2, will cause
errors.
Do I have to send all the optional arguments?¶
The Akismet web service supports a large number of optional arguments
to provide additional information for classification and training. You
can send these arguments when calling
comment_check()
,
submit_spam()
, or
submit_ham()
. The Akismet documentation
recommends sending as much information as possible, though only the
user_ip
and user_agent
arguments to those methods are actually
required.
Is this only for blog comments?¶
The Akismet web service can handle many types of user-submitted content, including comments, contact-form submissions, user signups and more. See the documentation of optional arguments for details on how to indicate the type of content you’re sending to Akismet.
How can I test that it’s working?¶
If you want to verify akismet
itself, you can run the test suite;
akismet
uses tox for
testing against the full list of supported Python versions, and
installs all test dependencies into the tox
virtualenvs. You can
also install the test dependencies from the test_requirements.txt
file in the source distribution, and then execute the test suite using
any standard Python test runner.
Running the test suite requires two environment variables to be set:
TEST_AKISMET_API_KEY
containing your Akismet API key, andTEST_AKISMET_BLOG_URL
containing the URL associated with your API key.
This allows the test suite to access the live Akismet web service to verify functionality.
If you want to manually perform your own tests, you can also
instantiate the Akismet
class and call its
methods. When doing so, it is recommended that you pass the optional
keyword argument is_test=1
to the
comment_check()
,
submit_spam()
, or
submit_ham()
methods; this tells the Akismet
web service that you are only issuing requests for testing purposes,
and will not result in any submissions being incorporated into
Akismet’s training corpus.
How am I allowed to use this module?¶
akismet
is distributed under a three-clause BSD license. This is an
open-source license which grants you broad freedom to use,
redistribute, modify and distribute modified versions of
akismet
. For details, see the file LICENSE
in the source
distribution of akismet
.
I found a bug or want to make an improvement!¶
The canonical development repository for akismet
is online at
<https://github.com/ubernostrum/akismet>. Issues and pull requests can
both be filed there.