Askimet numbers increase but shows no new spam
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It might have been a good idea to inform users of the change to how comments are to be moderated and allowed feedback prior to making those changes permanent. I have an old blog that I haven’t posted on in about 3 or 4 months and I’ve been getting several comments on one of my older posts for the past couple of weeks.
Why anyone thought it would be a good idea to automatically remove new comments on old blog posts is somewhat of a head scratcher.
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Mark did explain on the first page of this thread. However, for convenience sake I posted the link to his explanation above here https://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic.php?id=7559&page=2&replies=42#post-52046 and I have now copied and pasted it again below.
mark
Key Master February 7th, 2007 at 9:15 am
Here’s the deal.The latest version of Akismet (it’s full details are on the blog at http://akismet.com) has a feature which removes all comments on posts over 30 days old. Spam focused on those posts. So now if a comment is made that Akismet says is spam, it gets shot immediately and removed. If Akismet is not sure, it will appear in Akismet.
But it still keeps count.
If a spammer hits your blog with 1000 spams on a post from last August you won’t see them but Akismet will up the counter. -
timethief, calm down i think we are all confused, so we came here to ask, read, and that stuff. I really dont understand why activate that policy, is still weird. I’m sure, for example today i got like 30 or 40 comments more in the spam counter and only 2 comments were on the moderation. So I believe some real comments were deleted by the plugin and no one notified to me, and less to my visitors.
Thanks.
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@guaerver
Please don’t suggest that I’m not calm when you have no idea what I’m really feeling. I’m not the one who is worked up here. I’m a happy camper.You see I used to have pages of spam masquerading as comments on old posts every day. I was deleting hundreds of spam every day and I rarely ever found a false positive. This was the case with many other bloggers too. They were complaining that they were sifting through the Akismet filter and deleting 4-5-6 and more pages of spam each day. Now all we have to check on is the new stuff and the volume is greatly reduced.
Originally it was suggested that this be introduced as an option with each blogger making the choice whether or not to close comments on old posts. But introducing that as an option would probably mean the re-configuration of over 690,000 wordpress.com dashboards to enable such an option for each individual blog. That’s why I concluded that it seems unlikely that such an option will be introduced.
The way I see it I still get the hits from people reading the old posts, I still get the links, I still get the trackbacks, and I have more time to blog now that I’m not sifting through pages and pages of spam. So you see I am calm and happy.
If you think you have a problem with this then you can communicate with staff using the feedback button on the top right hand corner of any blog page.
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You still get the hits on old posts, but you don’t get the hits from people checking back to see what you said in response to them, because they know their comment didn’t show up. It does actively reduce the number of hits on your blog. Those comments which are mistakenly labeled as spam and happen to be on old posts will never show up in their My Comments page, won’t show on their dashboards, and thus their normal checking-back will not occur. Not to mention having one’s comments deleted does tend to discourage one from visiting a given blog.
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heh heh. Just noticed that the Akismet blog is hosted here at wp.com. Got the blue bar and everything. I wonder if it’s in the VIP program. ;)
The plugin has an config page for the 30 day option and it’s set to no as a default. It would be easy I would think to change this over to an options page and move it over although it may be hardcoded and removed. I just found it on my own WPMu install.
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Not sure if everyone’s clear on this, but Akismet on wp.com isn’t removing *all* comments on posts over 30 days old, just those it thinks are spam. I double checked and had that confirmed by Mark. I’d like it to be optional as well, but thought that should be mentioned.
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Akismet on wp.com isn’t removing *all* comments on posts over 30 days old, just those it thinks are spam.
Thanks for posting this.
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Agreed, I just saw the posts up there and was going to comment on that. They only get auto deleted if Akismet marks them as spam.
But with the recent issue with the false positives…
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raincoaster said, “Not to mention having one’s comments deleted does tend to discourage one from visiting a given blog.” That’s one of the biggest things that bugs me about not being able to check through my spam for false positives, as drmike called them. I was getting a number of comments marked as spam which were not every week. My first several posts had to do with an illness I contracted 11 years ago — one of my reasons for starting a blog was to be able to lend support and encouragement to others with the same illness. Just about every day my blog stats show that my blog came up in response to searches about that illness, and it kills me to think that someone might be post a comment or question about it, never see their comment show up, not know what’s going on, and not only not get an answer but think I am rude because they think I axed their comment.
The old way, the people who did not want to check through their spam didn’t have to — Askimet auto-deleted any spam caught after 30 days. But those who wanted to check through it could. That still sounds like the better option to me.
Perhaps there is a storage issue, though?
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By last count, Automattic had 66 servers within three data centers. Granted only some are database servers but it shouldn’t be an issue.
Good answer though.
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barbarah —
I have been with you on this issue from the start and I appreciate your continued and calm and elegant eloquence on the matter.
The other niggly issue is when YOU get caught by Akismet as a Spammer — for whatever reason — I’ve been caught several times where every single one of my comments was put in the Akismet queue where I was able to rescue them and then send the affected comment URLs to WP.com support for help and analysis.
The problem with the current False Positives setup is if WE get caught by Akismet and WE are responding to comments on posts older than 30 days — OUR comments get auto-deleted and we cannot fish them out of the Akismet queue and publish them and send in the comment URLs for analysis and fixing. Our comments are just… gone as if they never existed…
I save copies of all my comments, but I’d have to wait until the problem was sorted before I could begin to re-post the comments that were auto-deleted.
These days I hold my breath every time I comment on an older article.
I have mentioned these concerns to Support since they were first raised on Page One of this thread but I have yet to get a resolution.
EDITED TO ADD:
The problem with our own comments being auto-deleted on older articles is only important when Akismet has falsely marked us as Spammers. It’s happened to me several times — the current “all or nothing” setting assumes Akismet is forever and always 100% right and never wrong. -
Not to mention the VAST majority of what Akismet thinks is spam is on old threads. Yes, a majority of that is really spam, but some of it isn’t and we’d have no way of telling. Even with Akismet only displaying four or five comments a day, I’ve had two false positives in a week. That’s not a good ratio.
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What’s strange is I haven’t seen even an Akismet spam on any of my blogs here in quite some time. It does have me a bit concerned.
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I agree. The lack-of-Spam-silence is curious. The Akismet numbers jump up all day long but no Spam ever appears.
That’s the only sign of auto-delete in action, I guess.
There is tremendous comments gold in old articles and I value those readers who find those articles via the search engines and I have enjoyed having a guaranteed conversation with them.
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Right! So all that Spam is still being counted — big numbers caught are good PR for a Spam Catching Program — but we can’t see it any longer?
I don’t understand that disconnect in logic and since it isn’t the new universal way Akismet itself works — standalone folk can turn this new option off if they wish — it’s interesting only the WP.com sites are left in the dark without the option to see and manage what we used to be able to see and manage.
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I don’t understand that disconnect in logic
I actually do. It’s a setting that end users wouldn’t have to worry about. One less setting.
Either that or they listened to TimeThief requesting that you could turn off comments on 30 day old posts a few days ago. :)
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So the ability to turn off Snap! is more important and less worrisome than being able to turn off Akismet’s auto-removal of comments it thinks are Spam on posts 30 days and older?
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