Sharp increase in spam appearing in pending comments

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  davekoelmeyer · Member · Jul 5, 2013 at 12:41 am

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  Hi All,

  Over the past three months (I’ve only just got around to reporting this) I’ve noticed that the Akismet spam filter service appears to have become horrendously unreliable at filtering quite obvious comment spam. This seems to have accompanied my search hits tanking (I opened a support ticket about this a while back) – and while I’m not too concerned about the search hits, I am puzzled why spam is now not being detected in this way.

  You can see a small portion of my current pending comments at the following link – note the sender, subject and content against the target post – clearly not even the slightest relationship:

  http://ubuntuone.com/7mmf6XDLLpzC2pulPyZGRi

  If you could please take a look at why this is happening would be great – thanks.

  Cheers,
  Dave

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

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  rachelmcr · Member · Jul 5, 2013 at 11:27 am

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  Hi Dave,

  Sorry about the trouble, and thanks for reporting the issue. If you mark these pending comments as spam, Akismet should learn from seeing the pattern of spammed comments.

  You can also blacklist comments based on the comment author’s name, IP address, web site, as well as strings of text in the comment itself. Please make sure the word is not something contained in non-spam comments. For example, if you enter “press” as a blacklisted word, “WordPress” will match.

  I noticed that Akismet did pick up on a number of other spam comments on your blog during the same time frame, so this doesn’t appear to be an issue with Akismet not working at all. If, however, you are concerned about Akismet not working properly on your site, you can also contact Akismet support directly at this link: http://akismet.com/contact/

  I hope this helps!

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  davekoelmeyer · Member · Jul 5, 2013 at 12:31 pm

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  Hi Rachel,

  Thanks for your reply and advice.

  The thing his, I have been mashing the “spam” button for weeks and there is no sign that Akismet is learning at all. There is also zero difference to my eyes between the comments that have been marked as spam (there is no way a commercial spam filter could not mark them as spam), and the number that have accrued as pending for approval: this latter point in combination with the fact this never used to be a problem until recently strongly points to the service having degraded in some way over the past few months.

  I’ll go ahead with your suggestion and drop the Akismet folks a line – will post back here if they find anything.

  Cheers,
  Dave