Changelog

This is a list of changes made in released versions of this library, tracking since its 1.0 release.

Version numbering

This library currently tracks its version numbers using the YY.MM.MICRO form of Calendar Versioning (“CalVer”), in which the first two components of the version number are the (two-digit) year and (non-zero-padded) month of the release date, while the third component is an incrementing value for releases occurring in that month. For example, the first release issued in January 2025 would have a version number of 25.1.0; a subsequent release in the same month would be 25.1.1; a release the following month (February) would be 25.2.0.

The CalVer system was adopted for this library in 2024, and the first release to use a CalVer version number was 24.5.0.

API stability and deprecations

The API stability/deprecation policy for this library is as follows:

  • The supported stable public API of this library is the set of symbols which are exported by its __all__ declaration and which are documented in this documentation. For classes exported there, the supported stable public API is the set of methods and attributes of those classes whose names do not begin with one or more underscore (_) characters and which are documented in this documentation.

  • When a public API is to be removed, or undergo a backwards-incompatible change, it will emit a deprecation warning which serves as notice of the intended removal or change, and which will give a date – which will always be at least in the next calendar year after the first release which emits the deprecation warning – past which the removal or change may occur without further warning.

  • Security fixes, and fixes for high-severity bugs (such as those which might cause unrecoverable crash or data loss), are not required to emit deprecation warnings, and may – if needed – impose backwards-incompatible change in any release. If this occurs, this changelog document will contain a note explaining why the usual deprecation process could not be followed for that case.

  • This policy is in effect as of the adoption of CalVer versioning, with version 24.5.0 of this library.

Releases under CalVer

Version 25.10.1

Released October 2025

  • Fixed an instance of duplicated text in the README/documentation index.

Version 25.10.0

Released October 2025

  • Supported Python versions are now Python 3.10, 3.11, 3.12, 3.13, and 3.14.

  • Added a pytest plugin to make use of the test clients easier.

  • Removed the legacy akismet.Akismet client class. Use of either the synchronous SyncClient or asynchronous AsyncClient is now mandatory. The legacy Akismet client class had been deprecated and raising warnings since version 1.3.

  • Added the AkismetArguments typed dictionary to represent the set of optional keyword arguments accepted by the comment-check, submit-ham, and submit-spam API operations.

Version 24.11.0

Released November 2024

  • Supported Python versions are now Python 3.9, 3.10, 3.11, 3.12, and 3.13.

Version 24.5.1

Released May 2024

  • Corrected a missing release date in the changelog.

Version 24.5.0

Released May 2024

  • Adopted CalVer versioning.

  • Introduced the test client classes: TestSyncClient and TestAsyncClient.

  • The validated_client() constructor of both client classes now optionally accepts an explicit Config instance.

  • The default constructor’s config argument is now optional on both client classes; as with validated_client(), it will attempt to find the config in environment variables if it is not explicitly passed in. This means the only difference now between the default constructor and the validated_client() constructor is the validation of the key/URL in validated_client().

  • The key and url arguments to the verify_key() method of both client classes are now optional; if not supplied, verify_key() uses the key and URL from the client’s current config.

  • SyncClient can now be used as a context manager, and AsyncClient can now be used as an async (async with) context manager. In both cases, it is not necessary to use the validated_client() constructor; the config validation is performed when entering the context manager.

Releases not under CalVer

Version 1.3

Released February 2024

  • 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 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 2025. 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 in seconds.

Version 1.2

Released May 2022

  • 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

Released February 2020

  • 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).

Version 1.0.1

Released May 2017

  • Corrected several typographical errors in the 1.0 release documentation.

Version 1.0

Released May 2017

  • Significant rewrite of the pre-1.0 codebase. Prior to this, the last release was version 0.2.0 in June 2009.

  • Feature removal: Configuring the Akismet client by placing a specially-named file containing the API key is no longer supported. The only supported configuration methods are explicit constructor arguments or environment variables.

  • Feature removal: Specifying a custom User-Agent header value is no longer supported as a constructor argument. To set a custom User-Agent header, subclass the Akismet client and set the attribute user_agent_header to a dictionary containing the header(s) to send.

  • Method removal: The setAPIKey() method of the Akismet client class is removed.

  • The requests library is now a dependency.