Can Akismet work with WPMU?

Akismet is a WordPress plugin that will take care (eliminate) most of your comment spam. Akismet requires an API key that can be obtained in two ways.

a) for personal use create an account with wordpress.com and get the API key from there.
b) for commercial use you should buy an API key from Automattic.

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With WPMU you have two options to install the Akismet plugin. The first is to put it the plugins directory and then each user will have to activate it and insert an API key that he will have to get, on his own, from wordpress.com [see (a) above].

The second option is to put the plugin in the mu-plugins directory. If this is the case only one API key should be used and hard coded into the plugin. If you are not running a non-profit service then you will have to pay for the key.

However, some people think that they can take the API key they got for free from wordpress.com and hard code it into the plugin. That probably would work for a while but it will get you banned. Matt from Automattic said it best:

that would be a great way to be banned. 🙂

The Akismet plugin works out of the box with MU, you can let users enter their API key and you have no problems.

If you hard-code an API key for all your blogs the system will flag you and unless you already had permission from me you’ll be permanently blocked.

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