Bug in my BlogEngine.net Akismet Extension

Writing

So, I have been having problems for a while now with my blog not accepting comments from people that don’t enter a website into the comment form. Well, I wasn’t sure why this was happening, and I finally had a chance to trace down the issue. It took all of 10 seconds once I remembered to look for it, and embarrassingly it was my own code. Mea Culpa. Anyways, it all had to do with the fact that I was not checking the website property on the comment object for null before I made this assignment:

askimetComment.CommentAuthorUrl = comment.Website.OriginalString;

Geez. I have no one to blame but myself for not testing this properly, and I sincerely apologize to anyone that used the extension and has lost comments due to it. I have fixed it and updated the latest zip. You can grab it here:

BlogEngine.net 1.4 Akismet Extension

Loved the article? Hated it? Didn’t even read it?

We’d love to hear from you.

Reach Out

Comments (13)

  1. Hey Justin, I work wtih the team at Six Apart that makes TypePad AntiSpam, and after seeing your post thought I’d drop you a line to see if you wanted to update your library to support the service.

    TypePad AntiSpam is a free service for blocking blog spam, and unlike Akismet, it’s free no matter what you do with your blog, and the engine is open source. Best of all, it’s 100% compatible with the Akismet API, so it should be easy to update your library.

    If you’re interested, drop me a line, or just check out http;//antispam.typepad.com/ and see for yourself. 🙂

  2. I am having issues with your Extension on version 1.4.5 of BlogEngine. Whenever I try to save a comment with the Akismet extension enabled, the comment area just spins and never saves the comment. I am storing my posts as XML and not in a database.

    If I disable the extension, I can save without any problems. Are you aware of this problem in version 1.4.5?

    Thanks,

  3. @John The reason why it does this is because an exception gets thrown while the comment is saving. Do you have a development environment setup locally? If so then I would put a breakpoint in the "Post_AddingComment" section of the extension and see if you can spot where it is being thrown. Other than that I would tell you to verify your api key for Akismet.

  4. Hi Justin,
    Sorry if this is dumb question, but when you say edit AkismetExtension.cs with blog url and api key do you mean these lines?

    settings.AddParameter("apiKey", "api Key");
    settings.AddParameter("blogUrl", "blog Url");

    My ‘saving the comment…’ is just spinning, 1.4.5
    Thanks,
    John

  5. @JohnB In the latest version of BlogEngine.net, those settings should be setup in the admin side of the site. When you go into the plugin settings. You shouldn’t need to configure anything in the code.

  6. Sadly, the post right before mine is obvious spam that got through your system somehow. 🙁

    Thanks for sharing the extension though. I am looking to do the same for my blog, getting hammered with spammers these days.

  7. @Jason Yep, I probably still get one or two a week that get through, but I just chalked them up to misses with my spam filter or manual spam by someone being paid to leave comments. Overall though I have heard that the amount I receive is excellent compared to most people, so I figure that something is working 🙂

Leave a comment

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

More Insights

View All