How to solve the following problem:

“Server Connectivity: Unable to reach any Akismet servers. A network problem or firewall is blocking all connections from your web server to Akismet.com. Akismet cannot work correctly until this is fixed.Please contact your web host or firewall administrator and give them this information about Akismet and firewalls”

To solve this, you need to enable a setting in your php.ini file:

grep -in --color 'allow_url_fopen' /var/www/fcgi/joel.co.in/php5/php.ini
891:allow_url_fopen = off

As you can see, allow_url_fopen is by default set to Off.

You need to set it to On

allow_url_fopen = on

And then restart Apache. Now Akismet will start to work!