API key

[katleen]

What API key do I use on my blog? I tried my own but didn't work.

thanx

katleen

[Timothy]

What is an API key?

:confused:

[malign]

I tried to find out about your question, katleen.

I found out a little bit about API keys, including finding the option of putting one into your blog options, but I can't confirm that this feature is actually enabled on our site. I will investigate further, but I would recommend PM'ing our site administrator, whose screen name is 'Mark', for details.

I personally have had a blog here for quite a while, with completely open public permissions, without a single instance of spam in my blog comments.

Of course, it may help me that people know I'm a moderator. :-)

But I've never heard of any instances, either.

We do get spammers, but they seem to have avoided our blogs, so far.

If you did run into one, you now know who to talk to. :-)

[Mark]

An API is an "application programming interface". It's a way to access capabilities that are not native to a particular piece of software. Your own software makes a call to an API and sends some input, and then the server at the other end of the line does some computation and sends back a response. An API key is a long username or password type of thing that tells the API who you are so that your request may be accepted or denied as is appropriate. You may have heard of the term "mashup" meaning a web application built by mixing together parts from several different websites. Mashups are only possible because of APIs.

Please show me (by providing a link to a page) where you are being asked for an API key. There should not be anything in the blogs which requires that sort of thing to be provided.

[malign]

Mark,

There's a place on the Blog CP/Edit Options panel titled 'Spam Prevention', which wants a Wordpress API key so that it can verify blog comments with the Akismet anti-spam service.

That's as far as I got in my research; you'd have to tell us if that's enabled or not. :-)

[Mark]

Okay I think the API key is resolving to this:

http://akismet.com/personal/

Wordpress is a blog content managment system, and when people blog, people generally allow comments to be appended to each blog entry. Wordpress offers the Akismet anti-spam service as part of their software - but you need to have a key to use it, because Akismet is a third party API.

Our own blog system (a module within vBulletin) has the option for each user to enter a wordpress API key, or (I suspect) one of the free API keys that Akismet hands out for non-commercial use within non-wordpress blogs (such as ours).

So, what you'd do if you want to is go visit the link above and they will email an akismet key to your email address which you can then input into the link that Malign has provided. This should result in the activation of akismet anti-spam checking of any comments made to your blog.

If you allow comments to be posted without first approving them, this may be of some use. However, if you approve comments before posting them, it won't be so helpful, because nothing would get posted before you had a chance to throw it away.

Mark