Integrating Akismet with Joomlaboard Forum

June 29, 2007 — Antoine Toulme

JoomlaBoard is a very nice and simple forum that integrates to Joomla (one of the most common content management system available out there).

All the code is GPL and PHP, so you can deal with it as you want.

Recently we have had a lot of spam on our community website. Apparently there are people determined enough to register to the website, then confirm their registration via email and finally post spam. We respond most of the time in a matter of minutes, but too late for the RSS feed not to pick it up. So instead I have looked at a way to spamproof the forum some more. Apparently Akismet is one of the best tools out there, so I thought I ought to try it out.

I just used the PHP class developed by Alex. I copied it to the repertory components/com_joomlaboard/ in my Joomla instance.

I looked into the post.php file:

    215                //check if the post must be reviewed by a Moderator prior to showing
    216                //doesn't apply to admin/moderator posts
    217                $holdPost=0;
    218                if (!$is_moderator){
    219                   $database->setQuery("SELECT review FROM #__sb_categories WHERE id=$catid");
    220                   $holdPost=$database->loadResult();
    221                }

Hmmm, the $holdPost variable really looks good. We do not want to delete the message right away, it would be great to have it just moderated.

So I added those lines, which are an ugly copy/paste of the example provided with the PHP class, adapted to Joomlaboard:

    222                // the forum is not moderated by default, so we check for spam
    223                if ($holdPost == 0) {
    224                   include 'Akismet.class.php';
    225                   $WordPressAPIKey =  'xxxxxxxxxxxxx'; // replace it with your own key
    226                   $MyBlogURL = 'http://bpms.intalio.com';
    227
    228                   $akismet = new Akismet($MyBlogURL ,$WordPressAPIKey);
    229                   $akismet->setCommentAuthor($sb_authorname);
    230                   $akismet->setCommentAuthorEmail($email);
    231
    232                   $akismet->setCommentType('forum');
    233                   $akismet->setReferrer($_SERVER["HTTP_REFERER"]);
    234                   $akismet->setCommentContent($message);
    235                   //$akismet->setPermalink('http://www.example.com/blog/alex/someurl/');
    236
    237                  if($akismet->isCommentSpam()){
    238                     $holdPost=1;
    239                  }
    240                }

And then connected as John Smith to spam myself. I looked into the Akismet spam of my own blogs to get some crispy ones.

Moderated spam

Here is the diff of the post.php file, for those interested to apply it quickly.

Note that you will need to have an Akismet API key to be able to connect to the Akismet service.

Thanks to Pascal for letting me try this out !

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