Upgrading from previous versions#

Changes within the 1.x release series#

Version 1.3#

  • The supported Python versions are now 3.8, 3.9, 3.10, 3.11, and 3.12. Support for earlier Python versions is dropped.

  • Introduced the new SyncClient and AsyncClient API client classes.

  • The SyncClient and AsyncClient API client classes support the X-akismet-pro-tip header, and expose the “discard” header response by using the CheckResponse enum as the return value of their comment-check operation.

  • The SyncClient and AsyncClient API client classes support the activity and usage limit methods of the Akismet v1.2 web API.

  • Deprecation: The Akismet API client class is now deprecated, and will be removed in version 2.0. Instantiating this class will issue a DeprecationWarning. To discourage new uses of this class, its API documentation has been removed; refer to its docstrings, or to documentation for an earlier version of this module, if you continue to need documentation for it. All users of the deprecated Akismet class are encouraged to migrate as quickly as possible to one of the two new client classes, which more fully implement the Akismet web API. The deprecated Akismet class will receive no further features, and will only receive bugfixes if a security issue is discovered.

  • All of the API clients, including the deprecated Akismet class which formerly used requests, now use httpx internally as their default HTTP client. This provides uniformity of interface, async support, and better defaults (such as a default request timeout value). The default timeout is now one second, but is configurable by setting the environment variable PYTHON_AKISMET_TIMEOUT to a float or int value containing the desired timeout threshold.

Version 1.2#

  • The supported Python versions are now 3.7, 3.8, 3.9, and 3.10. Support for earlier Python 3 versions is dropped.

Version 1.1#

  • akismet tracks versions of Python supported upstream by the Python core team. Since akismet 1.1 was released after the Python core team dropped support for Python 2, akismet 1.1 and later do not support Python 2. The new minimum Python version supported by akismet is 3.5.

  • Support was added for the optional recheck_reason, used when a comment or other content is being submitted a second or later time, and indicating the reason (such as “edit” when resubmitting a comment after the user edited it).

Changes from older releases to the 1.x release series#

Prior to the 1.0 release, the last release of akismet was in 2009. If you were still using that release (0.2.0), there are some changes you’ll need to be aware of when upgrading to 1.0 or later.

Configuration via file no longer supported#

In 0.2.0, akismet supported configuration via a file named apikey.txt. Support for this has been removed in favor of either explicitly configuring via arguments as the Akismet class is instantiated, or configuring via environment variables. If you were relying on an apikey.txt file for configuration, you will need to switch to explicit arguments or environment variables.

Custom user agent no longer supported#

In 0.2.0, akismet allowed you to specify the string which would be sent in the User-Agent HTTP header. The Akismet web service documentation now recommends a standard format for the User-Agent header, and as a result this is no longer directly configurable. The User-Agent string of akismet will now be based on the Python version and the version of akismet, in accordance with the Akismet service’s recommendation. For example, akismet 1.0 on Python 3.5 will send the string Python/3.5 | akismet.py/1.0.

If you do need to send a custom User-Agent, you can subclass Akismet and change the attribute user_agent_header to a dictionary specifying the header you want. For example:

import akismet

class MyAkismet(akismet.Akismet):
    user_agent_header = {'User-Agent': 'My Akismet application'}

requests is now a dependency#

Prior versions of akismet were implemented solely using modules in the Python standard library. As the Python standard library’s support for easily performing HTTP requests is poor, akismet as of 1.0 has a dependency on requests, which will be automatically installed for you when you install a packaged copy of akismet.

API changes#

Finally, the public API of akismet has been modified to match the current interface of the Akismet web service. This has resulted in the removal of one public method of Akismet – setAPIKey – and changes to the argument signatures of other methods.

For details of the updated interface, consult the documentation.