Akismet Problems : Mike Little’s Journalized

Mike Little’s not-quite-so-daily thoughts, babblings, and random synapse firings!

A collection of random thoughts and links. Nothing too exciting. ;-) -- Mike Little

Saturday, 7 January 2006

Akismet Problems

by mike @ 02:46. Filed under

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.

[link]

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28 Responses to “Akismet Problems”

Oskar Syahbana Says:
January 7th, 2006 at 04:00
Exactly! Sometime my Akismet is returning a false positive against a legitimate comment. The weirdest problem is, s/he isn’t putting excessive links on their comments and not using an open proxy.

This is just weird, I think Matt should figure out the best way on coping with the problem (like displaying more than 150). Plus, with the user moderation, it’s a big possibility that spammer will mark legitimate comment as spam and thus gaming the whole system.

What do you think? Should I go back to WP-bayes (pretty much like akismet, only it’s installed within your system).
Roy Schestowitz Says:
January 7th, 2006 at 07:34
I have been wondering for a while what prevents a guild of spammer from downloading ans installing WordPress 2, getting an API key and then posting comments to self, then marking improperly en masse. Only a trusted few need be able to flag in order for robustness to fraud.

I mentioned this before
Jo Says:
January 7th, 2006 at 14:36
Touch wood, I’ve only had one legitimate comment caught by Akismet.
Chad Says:
January 7th, 2006 at 15:47
I tried Akismet for 1 week, had too many false positives that were lost, and went back to SK2. I also tried bad behavior, and I didn’t notice anything, however, I’ve been blocked from quite a few sites running BB, so I know it happens there too.
I have yet to have a false positive with SK2, and hope to stay that way.
Jax Says:
January 7th, 2006 at 16:51
Have just found your site having done a search for akismet issues - akismet started yesterday marking a comment from a friend and regular commenter as spam, and since then has refused to let any others of her comments through. I’ve mailed through the akismet contact form, but I’m now concerned that this friend will be unable to comment on any blogs with akismet installed.

The other thing that bothers me is, like you say, legitimate comments disappearing into the history - I noticed that when I retrieved one comment from my friend, another of hers appeared in the akismet display list, but spam is theoretically going through there faster than I can track it. I do possess the skills to go and investigate the database, but I’d really rather not do that - I think I’m going to have to disable the plugin at the very least until there is a response to this issue.
Making it up Says:
January 7th, 2006 at 18:28
Akismet word of warning

I know that at least one member of the blogring has upgraded to Wordpress 2.0, and I’ve been considering it myself. One of the features of Wordpress 2.0 is the integration of Akismet, which for wordpress 1.5.x users can be installed as a plugin…
erik Says:
January 7th, 2006 at 19:11
So you can only get this plugin if you are hosted with wordpress and have a lame whatever.wordpress.com sub-domain?
Sphinx7 Says:
January 7th, 2006 at 20:41
Have you tried the paged comment editing plugin? It might help to try and sort through those messages, and it will allow you to see all of your comments. I do not get get anywhere near the traffic that you get. I suspect I am the only viewer of my sight. But the plugin might help you.

http://www.coldforged.org/paged-comment-editing-plugin/
Xaxio Says:
January 7th, 2006 at 21:22
I’m having problems with Aksiment as well. It says that it caught 5 comments, but it’s only displaying two. I don’t want to just go and delete those other three if I can’t view them. I’m going to have to disable Akismet What is this SK2 you’re talking about?
Qrystal Illusions » Unfortunate Akismet Issues and Beats Per Minute Says:
January 7th, 2006 at 21:32
[...] First, the Akismet issues. The plugin is telling me I have five bad messages, but it’s only display two of them. The only option in the plugin is to “delete all messages”. I can’t view the other three messages to see if they are valid or not. I deactivated the plugin, and now all of the messages are gone. *sigh* You can see more about Akismet problems at Mike Little’s Journalized. [...]
mike Says:
January 7th, 2006 at 22:07
Erik,
You can only use the plugin if you have an account on Wordpress.com, but you don’t have to use that WordPress.com blog — strange I know!

Sphinx, I have installed that just this afternoon, after I found I couldn’t even find all of my new comments (there were 38 I kept in the end).

Xaxio, SK2 is Spam Karma 2, an anti-spam plugin for WordPress with a good pedigree and a lot of recommendations.

Mike
Abdul Mueid Says:
January 7th, 2006 at 22:11
I am using Akismet+, a modified version of Akismet that handles the comments in a neater way and has some benefits over default Akismet.
Get it from: http://incoherentcode.com/projects/akismet-plus/

So far, it is doing great for me!
OMEITOR Says:
January 8th, 2006 at 11:54
I haven’t had any false positives with Akismet, and I’ve been using it since it was released. The only problem I’ve noticed is a lag in the sending of the email notifiying me of the comments posted..
Matt Van Dusen Says:
January 8th, 2006 at 21:11
I’m using the SK2 Akismet plugin on my WP 2.0, works like a charm.
claus | Bad Kismet Says:
January 8th, 2006 at 22:34
[...] Seems that some people have run into problems with Akismet, the spam stopper developed by Matt Mullenweg’s Automattic. The basic issue seems to be that the tool is turning up a far bigger number of false positives as it should. [...]
John A Thomson Says:
January 9th, 2006 at 10:07
Many months ago was having comment spam problems. Tried many solutions but have been settled on SK2 for a good long while cause it simply works a charm. No false positives and it catches everything those parasites throw at it.

Have the WP development team thought of integrating SK2 into WP at some point?

Regards

John
mike Says:
January 9th, 2006 at 11:25
John
Even Akismet is not integrated into WP, it is simply a plugin. It just happens to be included by default now. To answer your question, I doubt that SK2 will be integrated.

Mike
Matt Says:
January 9th, 2006 at 22:26
Make sure you don’t have any values in your moderation keys or blacklist inside of WP, we’ve had quite a few people contact support whose comments were actually being caught by that.
mike Says:
January 9th, 2006 at 22:39
In fact I did have my moderation and blacklists populated, but I always have had. I’ve since cleared them.
I’m not sure what changed, certainly those lists didn’t, and neither did the content of the comments. Yet, for 5 days, not a single legitimate comment got through. In the end there were 41 false positives, and having removed a duplicate and a couple of inappropriate ones, I ended up with 38 comments I would have otherwise lost.

Before January 1st, I don’t think I’d had a single false positive (maybe one). Certainly nothing to worry me.

They are getting through again now, I’ll monitor it and see how things progress.
» Holding off on Akismet Spam Says:
January 10th, 2006 at 20:22
[...] At first I thought I was the only one getting this problem but further research led me to Mike Little’s own Akismet woes. [...]
{clausmoser|com} Says:
January 19th, 2006 at 23:18
Bad Kismet

Sieht so aus, als ob es bei einigen Bloggern Probleme mit Akismet gibt. Akismet ist die Anti-Spam-Software, die Matt Mullenwegs Automattic für Wordpress entwickelt hat und die in der Version 2.0 als Plugin mitgeliefert wird.
Akismet soll vor allem Ko…
Tov Says:
January 24th, 2006 at 22:16
I tried wordpress. It was a spam magnet. Needs Captchas, and IP Bans and word bans and more like pMachinePro.
MMRT daily life Says:
March 6th, 2006 at 03:05
[MM]Akismet Problems

どうやら今年初頭から既に問題になっていたようで・・・
＞Akismet Problems
日本でも問題になりそうな予感も・・・。
＞Akismetの誤判定
そして、私。
依然としてスパマー扱い。ということ…
Rich Boakes Says:
June 4th, 2006 at 13:49
Hi Mike, perhaps this will help with the false-positive identification: http://boakes.org/akismet-worst-offenders
If it’s useful, let me know
hanji Says:
January 10th, 2007 at 22:12
I started noticing severe Akismet problems yesterday. Lastnight, no comments from anyone/anywhere would be accepted. This morning, I thought it was fixed, but it’s still catching a lot of ham. I’ve been running with akismet for about 4 months, without a single false positive until yesterday.. now it’s letting 10% of the comments through.. and no spam is being sent to my site.

Hopefully this will get corrected soon.

hanji
Weblog Tools Collection » Blog Archive » APAD: Akismet Says:
April 11th, 2007 at 19:27
[...] The first and the more frequent of problems is false positives. My comments on several blogs running Akismet have been flagged as spam. And I am not the only one complaining about this. [...]
WeblogToolsCollection Español » Blog Archive » APAD: Akismet Says:
April 13th, 2007 at 18:21
[...] El primero y mas frecuente de los problemas son positivos falsos. Mis comentarios en algunos blogs que tienen Akismet han sido marcados como spam. y yo no el único quejándose de esto. [...]
我爱水煮鱼 » Akismet Says:
April 16th, 2007 at 16:37
[...] 第一个并且最常见的问题是它错误的辨别垃圾留言，我在很多安装 Akismet 的 blog 的留言都被认为是垃圾留言，当然我不是唯一抱怨这个的。 [...]

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