Have the spam filters on my blog changed (for the worse)?
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In my three years of blogging with WP, the spam filter has only missed 2 or 3 spam comments altogether—a pretty great record—until now. In the last week or so I’ve had more like one a *day* slipping past the gatekeeper. What’s up? Is there a setting I’m supposed to fix, or something? Thanks, Kathryn
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Hi Kathryn,
Thanks for bringing this to our attention. Our goal is for Akismet to catch 99% of the spam, but spam comments can get a bit tricky and slip by. I checked out your most recent comment and it looks like Akismet caught it as spam (under “History”):
https://kiwsparks.wordpress.com/wp-admin/comment.php?action=editcomment&c=16539#akismet-status
When these comments are slipping by, are you marking them as spam or just deleting them from your comment section? The former will help to train Akismet so these comments don’t slip by in the future.
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Thanks, Jeremey—
Yes, I’m careful to mark them as Spam before deleting them. I guess the spammers have just come up with a few new tricks for slipping through that Akismet will have to learn. Just surprised me, since it had been so impressively accurate until now, that there was a sudden spate of ‘misses’. As an aside, I’ll admit that when I do go through to clean out my spam, I can’t resist skimming through some, because there are plenty that are outright hilarious, if like me you get a kick out of the incredibly silly formats that are popular for spam “letters” and the amazingly bad, broken English “translations” used by obviously dependent senders. Ha! If we have to be spammed, it might as well be entertaining! ;)
All the same, I hope Akismet catches up with them again soon. :)
Kathryn -
Hey Kathryn,
I definitely agree – spam comments can be quite entertaining! If you continue to experience trouble even after marking them as spam, please let me know! If you could point out a specific comment that continues to slip by, a link or some content of that comment so I can track it down would be very helpful!
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That’s the trick, isn’t it: spammers make one or two tweaks to their addresses, subject lines and/or “content”, and it’s not quite the same to a filter anymore. Sigh. I’ll see if any exact duplicates seem to come through, but so far it’s just the formulaic junk *between* the tweaks that gives it away…. ;)
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