Driven to distraction by spam today
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Hi there,
I’ve had spam comments on my blog getting through the filter from time to time over the past couple of years, but nothing that’s been overly problematic.
Today has been a bit different though. I have had four different spam accounts posting their nonsense over four different posts of mine repeatedly. By repeatedly I mean they all come on within 5 minutes of each other, I mark them all as spam and a little while later they all come back again – same posters, same comments, on the same posts.
Now I thought the spam filter you use is meant to learn what is spam if you tell it when these comments come along? I think I have marked each of these repeated comments as spam seven or eight times today and yet they keep coming back soon after I zap them.
Any thoughts?
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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Don’t take this personally, and don’t spend too much time thinking about this. It is the job of spammers to spam, and they spend 24/8 doing it, and improving their skills.
It is the job of Akismet to help protect your site. It learns by you marking these as spam, not deleting them. Keep marking them. It can take a few minutes to a few days for Akismet to adjust to the new tricks the spammers are trying.
I wish I could work on my site as hard as they work on developing new ways to outwit spam filters. LOL!
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Greetings, BTLM and Lorelle,
I think that Beyond is correct: Something’s up with the spam here at WordPress. I’ve had CatRutgers4art.com since 2010, and until the past month or so the filter worked great: NONE OF THE SPAM COMMENTS APPEARED ON MY POSTS. HOWEVER, this started happening at one, but I thought it was a fluke and so went in and deleted the URL that was in the post text.
As of the past couple of days, spam comments are appearing regularly in different post comment boxes. And apparently I’m not the only one, as this topic has quite a few threads today.
Since I want readers to be free to comment easily, I didn’t set up moderation; personally, I hate having to wait when I want to respond to a blog. Now, I’m going to have to rethink my policy … and when I have the time will figure out how to use the blacklist, and will send screenshots to WP (as noted in another Support thread).
Meanwhile, my hunch (hope) is that staff will be giving a fresh look to the recent spam flood and the Askimet effectiveness.
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Just an update on this. Yesterday was ok actually and I thought that either the spammers had given up or their comments were now being picked up as spam at source after I flagged them as such around 8 times on Wednesday.
However they’re back again this morning: the same comments in the same order by the same set of posters. I’ve spammed them all twice so far today and the manner and the order in which they come on almost suggests something automated rather than manual.
I suppose I have to re-ask the question. How many times do you have to flag something as spam before Akismet ‘learns’ this. I’d have thought roughly ten times would be enough!
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I’m also also observing lot of SPAMs on my site SQLwithManoj.com, daily I get 10-12 SPAM comments in my comments list and I’ve to mark them as SPAMs. But my SPAM list is growing very rapidly. As soon as I delete some lot more comes in, and right now around 3k SPAM comments are there, which is pain to delete them as I can delete only 20 comments at once. Can WordPress automatically delete the comments marked as SPAMs?
~Manoj
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Another update. Today I have had repeatedly the same spam posts getting through by the same posters. I delete them off and within a few minutes they come back one by one over the space of around half an hour. There must be some sort of automation going on.
I’ve marked each as spam around 8 or 9 times today and close to 20 in all and yet they are not being recognised as such. It’s really, really annoying.
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A bit of context – my site is averaging over 1,100 spam comments a day – of those – about 100 to 200 get put in the spam queue – some of them are real obvious spam – and I do wonder why Akismet does not trash them directly – getting a couple a day that go to moderate now –
spam is big business – some of it is automated and some by people
My site is a low comment site – so the Moderate is not a bit issue for me
Keep marking spam as spam –
Also Akismet does learn and sometimes goes back an spams comments out of the moderate comments and move them to the spam queue – I see comments that I was sent notices for in the middle of the night and they are spam by the morning
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I’m with lorelle and auxclass on this. I have a mature blog with over 1,000 posts so of course I get thousands of spammy comments. Over 80% of all so-called comments submitted to WordPress.COM blogs every day are spam.
Aksimet is a learning engine. If you get spam that slips by Akismet then mark it as spam (do not delete it) and over time Akismet will learn it’s spam. On the spam that Akismet catches on it takes only seconds to click “empty spam” and you don’t even have to click “empty spam” if you don’t want to. Akismet will maintain comments it has caught for 30 days from the time they were received, and then it will delete the comment automatically.
There is no such thing as eliminating all spam but Akismet works very well. Set up comment moderation, if you have not already done so, because allowing anonymous commenting on your blog is like putting out the welcome mat for spammers.
This page > Settings > Discussion is where you set up defaults for comments. http://en.support.wordpress.com/settings/discussion-settings/
I reduce spam by using this setting:
3. Automatically close comments on articles older than __ days – This setting can be used to have comments closed on articles that are X days old. As an example, if you only want articles to accept comments for 30 days you would check the box and type 30 into the text field. http://en.support.wordpress.com/settings/discussion-settings/#other-comment-settings
And I moderate comments too. Comment moderation http://en.support.wordpress.com/settings/discussion-settings/#comment-moderation
Discussion Settings
Other comment settings
_Comment author must fill out name and e-mail
_Users must be registered and logged in to comment -
Just picking up on the comment ‘Aksimet is a learning engine. If you get spam that slips by Akismet then mark it as spam (do not delete it) and over time Akismet will learn it’s spam.’
That’s fine but that’s what I have been doing and if Aksimet is not learning something is spam after it has been flagged around 20 times in a short space of time, what are the chances it will?
I should emphasise that I have plenty of spam on my site normally. Most is picked up, while the ones that get through I’ll flag and tend not to see again. This is just totally different from anything I’ve experienced in 2 years of blogging and Aksimet is not coping.
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The chances that Akismet will learn over time are very good. All you need to do in the interim is to keep marking spam as spam and be patient. That said, do note that if you have approved a single spam comment on any post it can become a spam magnet that attracts other spammers to keep hitting it.
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Surely software learns by instance rather than by time? Time doesn’t really mean anything here in this context, whereas physically indicating to the spam filter over and over and over (now around 25 times) is what it needs to ‘learn’.
I get loads of spam in various Yahoo, Apple mail and Hotmail accounts and once I flag it as such then it doesn’t come back. That’s once and I would never, ever expect to have to do it dozens of times without any result.
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I don’t get that many comments so I prefer ideally not to moderate them, especially as I have not had any problems in the past. The posts being targeted with this problem are ones that have no other comments anyway.
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You have said:
I have had four different spam accounts posting their nonsense over four different posts of mine repeatedly.
Please post the URLs of the four posts in question.
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