fidzu : cms

Aidan Foster's keynote on adapting to AI: balance cheap execution with human judgment, deep customer relationships, and strategic creativity.

26 Oct 2026 3:27pm GMT

On October 25, Akismet turns 21. We're celebrating with a few new guests: an official Drupal module, a PHP SDK, and another year of improvements to our WordPress plugin. Spam still isn't on the list.

Akismet launched in October 2005 to help people spend less time dealing with comment spam and more time enjoying their blogs. The web has changed a lot since then. People build communities, collect inquiries, accept donations, and create applications on all kinds of platforms. Each of those places gives people a way to contribute. It also gives spammers somewhere to try their luck.

Since then, Akismet has blocked over 570 billion pieces of spam. Every one is something a site owner didn't have to spend time sorting through. Our birthday wish is to keep making more room for the real people.

Welcome, Drupal

This year, we released the official Akismet Drupal module, built by the team behind Akismet. It brings our spam protection to Drupal comments, contact forms, webforms, and user registrations, with tools for moderators to review submissions and send corrections back to Akismet.

We've continued building on that welcome. The latest release supports Drupal 12 and passes richer bot-detection signals into spam scoring. On Drupal 12, comments and registrations are supported now; contact forms, webforms, and the Key module will follow as those modules become ready for Drupal 12.

For people using the older community module, we also built an upgrade path to the official module that carries their API key and protection settings across. The migration guide explains the requirements and which settings need attention.

Welcome, PHP developers

Akismet's API has long made it possible to protect sites beyond WordPress. This year's official PHP SDK gives developers a first-party client for bringing that protection into their own PHP applications, including projects built with Laravel or Symfony.

The SDK handles the Akismet API integration so developers can focus on their application. It supports checking submissions, reporting spam and legitimate content, and retrieving usage and account information. The official Drupal module uses it too.

If you're building a place where people can post, sign up, or send a message, there's a new tool to help you keep the spam out.

A familiar guest, with a few improvements

WordPress has been with us from the beginning. This year, we kept improving that experience: clearer setup and error messages, accessibility improvements, better detection of automated submissions, and compatibility fixes. You can find the details in the WordPress plugin release log.

Version 5.7 also added support for Abilities and Connectors, helping Akismet fit into WordPress's evolving tools for integrating external services.

More room for real people

A comment worth replying to. A message from a future customer. A donation to a cause someone cares about. Those are the things we want coming through.

Thank you to everyone who uses Akismet, builds an integration, reports a problem, or helps us improve. You've been part of these 21 years, and you're very much invited to the celebration.

Whether your site runs on WordPress, Drupal, or something you're building yourself with the PHP SDK, there's room at the table.

Just no room for spam.

Try out the Drupal module today!

26 Oct 2026 3:16pm GMT

Opening access is only the first step. Sustaining the people, institutions and infrastructure that keep knowledge available is the greater challenge.

Behind every published research paper lies years of work, often supported by public funding. Yet the institutions producing that knowledge do not necessarily control how it reaches the world. New research released by SPARC on 14 October, ahead of International Open Access Week, estimates that more than 95% of investment in a typical research article occurs before publisher submission, based on its accounting model. A companion study found operating margins of 24% to 38% among major academic publishers in 2025. The figures raise an uncomfortable question: who should benefit from knowledge that society has largely paid to create?

Removing paywalls is important, but it does not automatically make scholarly publishing fair or sustainable. Some open-access models shift costs from readers to researchers through publication fees, potentially excluding scholars with fewer resources. Alternatives exist. Harvard Library, for instance, supports journals that charge neither authors nor readers. Such models still require institutional investment, editorial labour and dependable technology. The real challenge is not simply making research available, but ensuring that openness does not depend on another form of exclusion.

The same challenge extends to the infrastructure behind public knowledge. A 14 October appeal from SCOSS sought renewed funding for the Research Data Alliance and Software Heritage, noting that insufficient funding had delayed some planned standards work. Open-source communities understand these pressures. Drupal, for example, supports complex institutional publishing environments, including a UK university platform managing more than 190,000 research records. Maintaining such systems requires continuing work on security, accessibility, data management and technical reliability. The software may be open, but the responsibility of sustaining it remains substantial.

Perhaps the most important lesson from this year's Open Access Week is that openness needs a long-term commitment, not just a declaration of principle. Universities, governments and other institutions should treat shared digital infrastructure as an essential public investment, with predictable funding, accountable governance and support for the people maintaining it. The open-source movement has demonstrated what communities can build together. Its continuing challenge is ensuring that those contributions remain useful and accessible for generations. Knowledge should belong to everyone, but keeping it that way must also become everyone's responsibility.

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Kazima Abbas wrote and curated this issue of Editor's Pick.

26 Oct 2026 3:03pm GMT