Askimet comment eating monster strikes again.
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Is there any hope?
I’ve scoured the forums and apparently am not the only one that is having legit commments identified as spam and eaten, though I never get a chance to see it. I am losing readers, getting less and less comments as the supposed spam count found by Askimet continues to
rise.WordPress.com claims that the spam should show up in the queue within 15 days. This is nonsense as far as my blog is concerned. Rarely am I permitted to see one of there comments identified as spam. And I’ve been waiting well over 15 days while the numbers continue to rise, and my blog stats fall.
It is also impossible that the amount of spam Askimet is identifying and annhailating without my permission is real spam. If it were, I would have at least five spammers for every legit comment.
IS THERE ANY WAY OUT OF THIS WITHOUT MOVING THE ENTIRE BLOG?
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It’s possible that’s the right ratio for spam to comments; I get about 6 to 8 for every comment I receive and my readers have never told me a comment’s been lost. And I can guarantee someone like raincoaster or disembedded have a far, far higher ratio than that.
There’s no way to turn Akismet off on WP.com blogs, although some people have suggested it as a paid feature… if it’s something you’d like to see implemented, send a feedback to staff suggesting it when support opens. The more people who want it, the more likely it is they might come up with some kind of solution, though whether that’s a good idea or not is debatable.
The best advice I can give is to keep marking comments as not spam… Akismet should learn if you mark enough of them. If it doesn’t after a couple of months, there’s probably some other issue going on with your blog that you’d need to contact staff about. Your only other alternative is to self-host or move your blog and whether you want to do that depends on whether Akismet irritates you more than WP.com’s other features. Only you can make that call. :)
https://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic.php?id=14238&page&replies=70#post-103632 -
To mark comments as “not spam”, the comments should first show up somewhere – either in the spam queue or in the “awaiting moderation” queue. I have the same problem, the number of “spam comments” caught by Akismet is jumping quickly, but I never get to see those spam comments, so I really don’t know whether it is genuine spam or real comments being flagged erroneously.
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Also see thistimethisspace’s comment in this thread: https://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic.php?id=16293&page&replies=4
Life without Akismet, even with the problem of not being able to view what Akismet catches, would not be pretty.
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I hear you all on the ‘life without askimet’ factor, but honestly, this isn’t the first time I’ve blogged, and though my former blog had a much larger readership than the one I now have, I never got so many comments marked as spam.
Anyway, spam or not, the real issue us that it is not showing up in the queue, and there is no way to see if indeed these comments truly are… and if I hear you, the solution is basically ‘grin and bear it’.
Hmm.
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I don’t know that it will help any other than to confirm that staff are aware of the issue and striving to correct it but here’s a link to a closed thread that verifies this https://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic.php?id=14238
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I want to Askimet my Askimet.
My solution to Askimet was a simple one. Have a second filter…one that filters our spam, and another that filters key words, like WordPress has.
In this way, they still catch it, but I can choose to not have to look at or read blogs with multiple links as I scan for good ones caught. I can’t tell you how gross it is to have to look at that to filter out legitimate commercials. If I just didn’t have to read the full comment. List is by name! I can tell who my regular commentors are as opposed to spammers just by scanning the “short line”…name, email address, and blog back link.
Could wordpress not just give us that info on our “Askimet” page, rather than the entire comment…we could expand the comments if we needed to see them.
That seems do-able.
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Did I just say commercials? I meant comments…the fam is watching football talking about commercials.
Okay, so I’d still like WordPress to offer us a “unexpanded” version of ASkimet-caught comments with name, email, and blog link. I can sort fine with that info without having to read page after page.
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if you use Firefox, engtech has a great greasemonkey script that essentially does what you want. Find it here:
http://internetducttape.com/tools/wordpress/akismet-auntie-spam/ -
I have sent the following message to WordPress Support, and I would urge every WordPress user who is experiencing this same Akismet/Comment bug to do the same, letting WordPress know that this is a MAJOR and intolerable problem — but that there IS a temporary fix that could be easily implemented:
TO WORDPRESS:
I am writing about a matter that I — and apparently numerous other WordPress users, as well — consider to be a MAJOR problem — namely, that the mechanism by which readers of WordPress blogs can post comments is, at this point, essentially broken.
The reason I say this is that while Akismet may be stopping a ton of spam from getting through, it is also catching an abundance of perfectly legitimate comments in its net — and for some time now, WordPress site users have been unable to sift through the comments that Akismet is flagging to determine whether or not these embargoed messages are spam OR genuine responses from visitors to our sites.
In the past, EVERY SINGLE ONE of the comments to my site that Akismet had “caught” turned out to be legitimate comments — some of them, very important ones — which I then posted.
I realize that WordPress is aware of this problem, but the fact that no solution for it has yet been devised means that in the absence of a viable workaround, the ability of visitors to leave comments on WordPress sites is currently, for all intents and purposes, severely restricted, if not completely sidelined.
On my own site, I have implemented a temporary patch (and I hope that TEMPORARY is exactly all that it will need to be):
It isn’t pretty (especially as compared to the ladies that it bumped down the page), but I suppose that for now, it’s better than losing still more comments to the voracious and indiscriminate jaws of the Akismet shark.
However, only one person has thus far taken advantage of this alternative, indicating that most feel more comfortable leaving comments the conventional way. And most of my fellow WordPress users haven’t even tried applying the band-aid that I did — possibly because the majority of them aren’t even aware that an enormous number of legitimate comments that their sites are receiving are just winding up in a black hole.
And that’s precisely what’s so troubling about this situation: How many hundreds of readers of WordPress blogs are being alienated because their perfectly legitimate comments are being perfunctorily and permanently discarded due to a bug of which they’re not even aware?
And how can that help but result in their making the assumption that their comments are being rejected, leaving them feeling disenchanted toward the site(s) in question?
I can understand the reluctance (perhaps “unwillingness” would be the more accurate term) of WordPress.com to turn off Akismet. I appreciate how much real spam it catches.
But UNTIL THIS BUG IS ONCE AND FOR ALL CORRECTED, COULDN’T WORDPRESS AT LEAST GIVE BLOGGERS WHO PRE-SCREEN ALL COMMENTS TO THEIR SITES THE OPTION TO TURN OFF AKISMET? Under this arrangement, turning off Akismet would automatically turn on the requirement of bloggers to screen all of their messages.
Such a workaround would at least give those of us whose sites are really suffering because of this problem some much needed relief until WordPress solves the problem for good.
Why can’t the above suggestion be implemented? Please…Give us beleaguered bloggers a break.
Thank you.
Respectfully and Sincerely,
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@thegolddiggers
When you post here to the forum to as many threads as you just did then each thread now contains a copy and paste duplicate post from you. Volunteers (your fellow bloggers who are not paid to do so) do their best to give answers to your questions in all those threads. This takes time and effort.In the case of Akismet volunteers can offer no help at all. Only staff can help you and the way you can be sure that they do hear you and what you have to say is by using this link http://wordpress.com/contact-support/
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I have exactly the same problem. Why is Akismet working overtime. I think spam comments should age for a week at least before they get junked. Can’t reach support- they are closed right now. So I am in the ‘Grin and bear it’ mode.
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Akismet doesn’t flush comments until 15 days after they hit the akismet spam queue. The problem is that for whatever reason, some of us are not able to review them. In other words, they don’t show up when we go to look. It’s a known problem, and we have not heard anything from staff on it for a while. I too see virtually none of the spams that akismet is catching for me. Best you can do right now is wait till support opens and then send in a support ticket.
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Because I am a new blogger and I usually have few clues about how this works, I am relunctant to comment, but it if helps comments from being”eaten by the Akismet Shark”, I will add my $.02. My blog has only been up for 4 weeks. All but one comment has been in the Spam. I didn’t even know there was such a thing until someone emailed me wanting to know where the comment went and suggested I check the spam folder. There is was and there is where I have the few comments that my young blog received. One comment was asking for a reply and I don’t want that person to think that I don’t care to respond. (My blog is about being a caregiver for my husband who is a cancer victim) This person had info about a treatment options. I don’t want to think that I am missing important info that may be helpful in our fight against cancer.
I don’t know technically how to do “patches” or much about the mechanics of blogging, but I would appreciate the “Spam Shark” to go easy on my blog before it fizzles without a chance to fulfill the purpose that I intended for it…… -
@shadowlands1501
If legitimate comments get caught in spam, you will need to “unspam” them so that akismet will learn. After doing so a few times, it will learn and no longer quarantine them. Akismet seems a little overzealous at times, but it will learn. Make sure and check it daily until things settle down, but I would suggest checking it several times a week at any rate just to make sure.The problem most people in this thread are having is that they cannot review their spams (they don’t show up in the spam folder so they cannot despam or approve legitimate comments) and that issue is different from what you are describing.
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Askimet is saying it has detected two more comments than it is showing me. I am afraid to empty my “spam box” for fear it will also eat the comments. Exactly as thesacredpath says. It distresses me, to the extent that someone is trying to reach out to me (maybe) but I cannot “hear” them due to the mal-functioning spam filter. I’ll report the problem as soon as I can, meanwhile is there another topic on this problem, perhaps with a troubleshooting guide?
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@katm
If there are only the spams showing, then it will only delete the spams. There really isn’t any way for us bloggers to troubleshoot anything since we don’t have backend access. It’s sad that staff doesn’t update us at all, but I assume that if they had any news, we would hear about it (or not). I wouldn’t worry about deleting the spams. Akismet will delete them in 15 days anyway regardless. Which is a though, you can always just leave them in there, it isn’t hurting anything. -
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