Akismet Accidents?

I posted a comment the other day and it didn’t show up until today. I was too lazy to e-mail you though :) Perhaps you should add some type of contact form for us lazy folks to send you a quick note without too much pain?

I use Spam Karma 2.2 with an Akismet plugin. Works much better than Akismet alone. Spam Karma will tell you by email when it catches comments. For the most part all the legit ones go through.

[...] It sounds like Alec Saunders is experiencing the same Akismet ecstasy that I am. Chris Pirillo, though, not quite as excited. Chris reports massive false positives. What could be up with that? I haven’t had one false positive in hundreds of spomments caught. There aren’t any configuration parameters, so it would be hard for it to be something Chris did in setting it up. I don’t know how Akismet works, but perhaps there is some text being analyzed from Chris’ site that is always considered spammish? Or maybe it was a momentary failure of the Akismet service? Any other ideas? [...]

options/discussion is where you tweak comment moderation, including email notification.

Hmm, check
“Comment Moderation

Hold a comment in the queue if it contains more than x links”

Maybe it’s set at 0 links, so it’s holding everything?

Akismet marks comments as “spam” … which is different from “0″ (moderation queue). So it’s not the old 0 links trap.

I’d make sure there aren’t any common phrases in the blacklist that might be catching things and I’d disable the “Blacklist comments from open and insecure proxies” setting. After that, you just have to have a little faith. I had some false positive problems in the beginning with Akismet, but it’s working very well now… haven’t had a false positive in a few months, and it misses only a couple of spams a week.

Oh, and just FYI, unless you’ve modified the plugin, Subscribe to Comments 2.0 won’t send notifications for Trackbacks or Pingbacks… just regular comments.

I too get quite a few false positives. Also for some reason the amount of spam I am getting daily seems to have jumped astronomically ~ 1500 per day!
This is making it impossible for me to effectively use akismet.

However spam karma is not the solution. It is very viewer unfriendly. It boots out legitimate commenters for unknown reasons. With earlier versions it used to spew pretty insulting messages. It may have slightly improved these days.

I think you should evaluate Bad Behavior plugin.
James Huff (macmanx.com) strongly recommends it. Give it a shot.

BTW: I noticed you are using my Translator plugin. An attribution would be nice.

Even better. ;) I’ve sent you $20 to “register” the plugin – I appreciate it!

So far I’ve had no problems with SK2 at all, infact I’ve been using it for months, and only has it ever caught two legit comments.

TheGiant,
The problem with SK is that it prevents legitimate commentators from commenting due to unexplained spurious reasons. Additionally it may insult your commentators too.

Chris,
> Even better. ;) I’ve sent you $20 to “registerâ€�? the plugin – I appreciate it!
Really! I haven’t received anything from you.
If you want to PayPal use sales[at]taragana[dot]com

I asked about clarification this morning ( http://lorelle.wordpress.com/2006/05/21/check-your-wordpresscom-comments-for-comment-spam/ ) but between both services and the 10K switches, I have no clue.

Hey I understand that SK insulted people trying to leave legit comments. That’s SK, I use SK2 (2.2) which shares nothing but the concept with SK1, and according to the author the rude messages are not there now. I’ve only ever had three legit comments caught by it and they were by friends, who would have said something, heck they didn’t even know their comments didn’t go through.

Aye, but anyway, no point in arguing now is there. Chris doesn’t need a war over a WordPress plugin, I was just dropping a suggestion, because it works fine for me.

The problem is not just the rude comments. Often they will block people from commenting. The worst part if that the weblog author doesn’t realize that it is preventing legitimate commentators. Google for it and you will hear many stories from both sides. IMHO it is commentator unfriendly while suppressing its deed to the blog owner. I have had better experience with Bad Behavior as well as Akismet.

[...] Problems with Wordpress comment spam blocker? Chris Pirillo reports that he’s been having problems with Wordpress’ Akisment service. Apparently, it’s been blocking perfectly good comments without notifying him. Our resident Wordpress guru Jason Preston (whose newest blogging venture is Flicker Gaming) says that he’s never had this kind of problem with Akisment before. His only complaint about the software is he thinks it “makes up spam” telling him he’s been hit with thousands of spam comments – even though he didn’t have a serious spam problem before turning on the service. [...]

I’ll second the recommendation for Bad Behavior. (Then again, it’s my plugin.) (On the other hand, you’ll also see my name in the credits for Akismet.)

The point of Bad Behavior is to keep out malicious traffic before your web server has to expend too many resources on it, such as querying the database, generating a page, letting them see your e-mail addresses or scrape your comment form… and by so doing, blocks most spam long before you ever have to deal with it in the Manage Spam screen.

Akismet isn’t perfect, unfortunately. I should know. It even marks my comments as spam sometimes. There’s not really much you can do to Aksimet about this, but you should also be running Bad Behavior, to keep out the spammers before they even hit your site at all. (Which means there’s far less junk to view in the Akismet Spam page.)