Akismet Problems

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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.

29 thoughts on “Akismet Problems”

  1. 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).

    Reply ↓

  2. 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

    Reply ↓

  4. 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.

    Reply ↓

  5. 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.

    Reply ↓

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  9. 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?

    Reply ↓

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  11. 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

    Reply ↓

  13. 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..

    Reply ↓

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  16. 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

    Reply ↓

  17. 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

    Reply ↓

  18. 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.

    Reply ↓

  19. 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.

    Reply ↓

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  25. 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

    Reply ↓

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  29. Firstly, great blog… so much of interest and use on it.

    And secondly, on to Askimet!! Until about 3 months or so ago Askimet span worked fine for me stop­ping 90%+ of spam and with what seemed high accur­acy. Then over night everything changed. Askimet stopped catch­ing spam and stopped being able to see what was and what was not spam.

    I am sure that I do not get that much spam com­pared to some but com­ments on other sites such as read your spam com­ments are not really prac­tical (I get sev­eral hun­dred a day and rising) and totally neg­ate the point of hav­ing it in the first place.

    Over the last day or two the stats were as follows…

    Total com­ments & spam 359.
    Await­ing mod­er­a­tion 174 – Spam 170, legit­im­ate 4.
    Askimet spam 185 – Spam 168, legit­im­ate 7.

    This would imply that Askimet is guess­ing and not that well at that. I have emailed Askimet to ask for advice but would be inter­ested if any­one else has exper­i­enced a rapid change in for­tunes with Askimet, what caused it and what the solu­tion is…

    Reply ↓

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