Why are so many spam comments getting through all of a sudden?

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  abyaday · Member · Mar 27, 2013 at 1:00 pm

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  Why are so many spam comments getting through all of a sudden? The spam filter used to be really great, but in the last couple of days I’ve been getting a LOT (in the 20’s) of spam comments – bad translation, really, really old posts, etc., and I get an email for each of them. Did something change recently because it’s crazy how many have been getting through just since Saturday.

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  amightywp · Member · Mar 27, 2013 at 4:03 pm

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  Hi there,

  Sorry about the trouble, and thanks for reporting the issue.

  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.

  Also, please mark those comments as spam instead of just deleting. Our Akismet anti-spam engine tries to learn from a pattern of the comments that are marked as spam.

  For more information about dealing with unwanted comments, visit:
  http://en.support.wordpress.com/unwanted-comments/

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  abyaday · Member · Mar 27, 2013 at 4:07 pm

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  They’re actually varying the wording. Some of them are full of praise, some are insulting, some ask a question, and then some just are completely random. They were all coming from .ru addresses, but now they’ve changed that as well and they’re coming from gmail. That’s why I haven’t blacklisted any of them; I’m afraid of blacklisting comments I do want.

  I have been marking them as spam, but I’m still getting the emails. And again, I can’t shut the emails off because I want to know about good comments…

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  amightywp · Member · Mar 27, 2013 at 4:28 pm

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  The Akismet system will continue to try and catch as many as possible, however we will continue to need you to mark any that you come across as spam! Thank you very much for helping out with that, as it is input like that which lets us continue to hone our systems!