I’ve been going hog-wild on plugins and themes lately. This new plugin is called “Akismet Spam Count Display”, but I call it ASCD for short. Yeah, I’m original like that.

Akismet is a spam filter specifically for blogs and even more specifically for WordPress blogs. It’s free to sign up for and then there’s a central repository that filters all the incoming comments. Looking at my Akismet log, I’ve got a whole lot of spam. Since yesterday, I’ve probably got about 300 or so. Akismet blocks nearly all of them. It then displays the ones it suspects of being spam so I can delete them. It doesn’t mess with user comments unless they have been marked by some service as spam.

The ASCD plugin started as Akismet Spam Count, a very good plugin by Ronald Heft, Jr. It grew out of some things that I had seen on the internet. One site had a graphical display for the Akismet Spam Count plugin. With Spam Karma 2, another excellent spam blocking plugin, there were messages that could be displayed that were kind of “in your face” but funny. I wanted to make the message configurable, but I also wanted the option of the graphical display that I saw on another blog.

Enter Akismet Spam Count Display (ASCD). It allows the WordPress user to easily choose which type of message (graphical or text-based) to display on the sidebar. If the WordPress user chooses a text-based message, they can type in the text that will be displayed, along with some special characters to allow for display of special items.

The plugin is also widget-aware. If you use the excellent Sidebar Widgets plugin, this plugin plays well. It has a mini-admin interface in the widget as well as the full-blown admin interface.

To install ASCD, simply drop the two files (”akismet_count_display.php” and “akismet.gif”) into the existing Akismet directory in your WordPress plugins directory. (wp-content/plugins/akismet/) If you have removed that folder, just drop the two files into the WordPress plugins directory. (wp-content/plugins/) Then go to the “Plugins” area of your Admin Panel and activate the plugin. To configure the plugin, go to the “Options” area of the Admin Panel and click on “ASCD”. There are three items you can customize here:

• Sidebar Title Text - This is the title to the section in the sidebar where the Akismet stats will be displayed. Remember that if this is too long it will wrap on your sidebar and that some themes can’t handle sidebar titles wrapping. If you leave this blank, it will default to “Got Spam?”.
• Sidebar Display Type - You can select between a graphical message and a text-based message. The graphical message is not configurable. The text of the text-based message is configurable.
• Sidebar Display Text - This is only displayed if you have selected a text-based message. You can type in pretty much anything you want for your text message. There are some special things to type so that the display can be personalized:
  • {Akismet} = Display the word “Akismet” with a link to the Akismet website
  • {blog} = Display your blog name in bold type
  • {count} = Display the number of spams Akismet has blocked
  • ' = Apostrophe ( ‘ )
  • " = Quotation Mark ( ” )

Other than these special characters, pretty much any character you type will be displayed as it is shown on the text line. For example, if you want an “in your face” message, try this:

Don't even think about spamming {blog}! It's protected by {Akismet} which has eaten {count} spams so far… but it's STILL HUNGRY!

I hope you find this plugin useful. You can download it by clicking here, or you can go to my WP Mods page and download it there.