Spam issues – Akismet being a little unhelpful
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I’ve been having a huge amount of spam on my blog over the past few months. Akismet tells me that last month, I had over 48,000 spam comments. Somewhat understandably (albeit irritatingly), quite a few made it through the filter.
The thing is, despite my having to manually mark these as spam, Akismet is still convinced it has a 100% accuracy rate (I must say, I find its conviction rather admirable, despite being clearly incorrect). Is this just a flaw in the software, or is there any way to fix this? I hate to burst Akismet’s adorable little robot bubble, but it should really be logging all of those missed spam comments, surely…
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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Hi!
Sorry about the trouble, and thanks for reporting the issue. Akismet catches the majority of spam when it’s coming through. However, occasionally, it can let a comment by if it doesn’t trigger a high enough spam score to get blocked. However, in this scenario, it’s helpful to mark comments as spam rather than just deleting them. Akismet anti-spam engine tries to learn from a pattern of the comments that are marked as spam.
If a lot of the spam comments have a common string of text, I suggest adding that string to your blacklist:
http://en.support.wordpress.com/settings/discussion-settings/#comment-blacklist
You can use the comment author’s name, IP address, web site, as well as 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.
For more information about dealing with unwanted comments, visit:
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Thanks for the reply. :)
I have been marking all of those comments as spam – I was just curious about whether or not Akismet was registering them. My Akismet stats page still only says I have 1 missed spam message. In any case, I’m honestly grateful that Akismet exists at all. As I write this, it’s blocked a total of 231,759 spam messages from my blog!
I’ve added a few things to my blacklist (shoes, handbags, dresses, and various types of pills seem to be among the things I’m often spammed about). Unfortunately, there isn’t much consistency in the IP addresses, e-mails, or even the content of the spam messages. Which makes things a little problematic.
Incidentally, does the blacklist treat each line as an individual string? If so, am I allowed to use spaces in these? Or do I need to put strings inside quotes like with search engine queries?
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Howdy!
Please see below!
I have been marking all of those comments as spam – I was just curious about whether or not Akismet was registering them. My Akismet stats page still only says I have 1 missed spam message.
If you’re marking them as spam, Akismet should be learning about those comments and catching future ones just like it in the spam folder. If you notice this not working correctly, please let me know!
Incidentally, does the blacklist treat each line as an individual string? If so, am I allowed to use spaces in these? Or do I need to put strings inside quotes like with search engine queries?
Each line is treated as an individual string. No quotations necessary. You can include spaces to indicate phrases if necessary. So, the following could work:
football Superbowl party go long wide receiverHowever, something like “Superbowl” would still get through because the blocked string is more specific. Does that make sense?
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