I’ve just spent a rather pain­ful 45 minutes recov­er­ing legit­im­ate com­ments from my Akismet admin panel. Pain­ful because Akismet had over 1400 com­ments marked as spam from the last week.

That num­ber is not excess­ive for my blog: Akismet has caught over 12,000 spam com­ments since I installed it; but I’ve not been keep­ing on top of the list this week. Unfor­tu­nately check­ing for false pos­it­ives is impossible once you have more than 150 spam comments.

The Akismet plu­gin dis­plays the new­est 150 com­ments each with a check box to allow you to sep­ar­ate the legit­im­ate ones from the rub­bish (the ham from the spam). That’s great: check the boxes, push the “not spam” button.

How­ever, the only other action is to delete all the com­ments that Akismet has determ­ined are spam. But if you have legit­im­ate com­ments that are not in the most recent 150, you can­not see them to res­cue them.

Luck­ily for me, I’m tech­nical enough that I can fig­ure out how to get round prob­lems like this, but most people are not.

In the end, I res­cued some­where between 40 and 50 com­ments. I’m not sure of the exact num­ber because I wasn’t pay­ing atten­tion, and releas­ing them from Akismet’s clutches doesn’t trig­ger the email noti­fic­a­tion so I can’t count the emails either. Not one single com­ment was let through in the last 6 days. I don’t know whether this is a minor hic­cup from Akismet or the start of an alarm­ing trend.

I then spent another 20 minutes respond­ing to some of them. Oh yeah, and I’ve spent another 30 minutes writ­ing this post!

I think I will have to look at enhan­cing the Akismet plu­gin. Either by adding a ‘delete just spam in the list’ but­ton or by adding pagin­a­tion to the list of spams. The former sounds far easier than the latter.