Insane amount of spam comments in Akismet que

  • Unknown's avatar
    pennedbyjenn · Member ·

    I am so confused by this. My blog, which is a portfolio – and therefore I don’t think gets that much traffic, receives thousands of spam comments weekly. I started it only 2 months ago and I’ve cleared 6,500 spam comments from the queue.

    I have another blog, a personal craft blog, which seems to get substantially more traffic, and I’ve only had 5 spam comments blocked by Akismet – EVER.

    Can anyone shed some insight? In theory its not a problem worth complaining about as Akismet effectively blocks them all, but I’ve read its possible for Akismet to occasionally block legit comments and I have no of filtering through my Akismet queue to make sure this doesn’t ever happen because it is so bogged down with spam.

    Am I responsible for this – could there be some settings which are provoking this spam behaviour?

    The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

  • Unknown's avatar
    pennedbyjenn · Member ·

    …*I have no reasonable way of filtering through…*

  • Unknown's avatar
    timethief · Member ·

    The vast and overwhelming majority of information on the internet is spam. Over 80% of all so-called comments submitted to WordPress.COM blogs every day is spam. Spam comes in waves. Spam can be posted by bots and there are also people who are paid to submit spam comments.

    If you approve a single spam comment on a post the original spammer will hammer that post and will sell the URL to other spammers and phishers who will do the same. if you approve comments with links in them the spammers will do the same thing. If you set up anonymous commenting spammer will have a field day.

    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.

    Read Five things every blogger should know about spam
    http://docs.akismet.com/general/spam-facts/

    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

    Here’s a reality check. The vast and overwhelming majority of all so-called information on the internet is spam. Over 80% of all so-called comments submitted to .wordpress.com blogs every day are spam.

    See here for comment blacklisting http://en.support.wordpress.com/settings/discussion-settings/#comment-blacklist

    Also, do not put IP addresses in the blacklist. IP addresses are no longer unique, and you might end up blocking legitimate visitors. In fact for over a decade only about 30% of us have IPs that trace back to any individual computer. Also, all they would have to do is go to a wi-fi hot spot, or connect via a different ISP and they could get around that.

  • Unknown's avatar
    pennedbyjenn · Member ·

    Thanks… I’ve read all those links before. This didn’t really address my question, which maybe wasn’t clear enough.

    Why is there such a disparity in the number of spam comments my two blogs receive? I would expect the high-traffic blog to receive more spam, but the low traffic blog is actually the target.

    Maybe there is no answer for this :).

    Akismet is working very well, that’s not my problem. It catches everything and I know I can simply empty it – that’s what I always end up doing. I’m concerned I might accidentally be emptying legitimate comments hidden in the detritus because I cannot sift through 2000 spam comments a week.

  • Unknown's avatar
    timethief · Member ·

    Why is there such a disparity in the number of spam comments my two blogs receive? I

    I do not know.

    I would expect the high-traffic blog to receive more spam, but the low traffic blog is actually the target.

    It’s my experience that it is the subject matter that attracts spammers and some subject matter seems to attract more spam regardless if it is on a low traffic blog or not.

    I’m concerned I might accidentally be emptying legitimate comments hidden in the detritus because I cannot sift through 2000 spam comments a week.

    That’s possible but based on my 10 years of blogging (8 here at wordpress.com) I don’t even check the spam queue. I trust Akismet.

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