The founder of Automattic, Matt Mullenweg, decided to create Akismet so that his mother could blog in safety.[4] In 2005, there were discussions about how to deal with comment spam and a few plug-ins were available. Mullenweg's first attempt was a JavaScript plug-in which modified the comment form and hid fields, but within hours of its launch spammers downloaded it, figured out how it worked, and bypassed it.