If you're tired of spam comments or people flooding your PHP application with junk text and links, you'll definitely want to check out this new tutorial from PHPit.net. It looks at how to integrate the Akismet anti-spam service into your application.
I've started using Akismet myself recently, and it has completely cut down all the spam I was receiving. Normally I'd get about 700 spam comments a day on my various blogs and websites (including PHPit), but since installing Akismet I've only received four. That means that approximately 99,5% is being caught by Akismet, which is an extremely good rate, and what's even better is that Akismet hasn't caught one good spam comment (no positives). Sounds pretty good, right?
In this article you'll learn how to use the Akismet anti-spam service to prevent any spam from being added to your PHP website. Live examples and demo's are included.
To start off right, you need to know how the service works and what kind of methods you'll need to access it. They show a simple connection to the service as well as two functions to mark something as spam and to mark it as non-spam (or 'ham' as he calls it). He also links to their development page and to the WordPress plugin that performs the same action.