I resist using CAPTCHAs whenever I can to offer my visitors the best user-experience. Who likes to comment a post when you additionally have to decipher symbols on an image only to type them into a textbox?

For this reason I activated Akismet on all of my blogs. Now it quietly checks every comment and removes it, if it is detected as spam.

Now it happens that I own a community site based on WordPress MU, enabeling every registered member to run their own blog.

Unfortunately Akismet needs an API-key which has to be inserted by hand on each and every blog. At least that’s what I thought until today.

There is an easier way to globally activate Akismet on WordPress MU and specify an API key that cannot be changed. Follow these steps to aktivate Akismet on all your WP MU blogs:

1. Move the “akismet” directory from the “plugin” directory to the “mu-plugins” directory,
2. move the file “akismet.php” to the “mu-plugins” directory,
3. open the file “akismet.php” with a text editor and add your API key on line 12.

Now you have activated Akismet on all blogs and the ability to change the key is gone.

With this setup users can’t deactivate the spam protection and you can apply yourself to more important things.
Like how to get more visitors to your community site.

Oh, and BTW: I accidently the whole site. But thanks to Google Cache I had a backup of all my posts. Just think about it when you accidental delete your whole database.