Why are so many spam comments getting through the filter?
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I have had a wordpress.com blog for some considerable time now and I have never been troubled by spam – it nearly all got caught by the filter. I think I have had maybe one or two slip though in *years*.
And now for, I dunno, a month I am getting between two and five comments a day slip though that I have had to manually set as spam.
Have I checked something I shouldn’t have? Have the spam filters changed? What’s going on?
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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Spam comes in waves. There are human beings who get paid to post spam. There are robotic programs that post spam. There’s nothing unusual about what you are getting. Sadly, we all get it.
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.
The worst of all spam containing malware and viruses is not sent to us. It’s removed as it could bring down many blogs if opened.
On the spam that Akismet catches 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 15 days from the time they were received, and then it will delete the comment automatically.
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.
There is no such thing as eliminating all spam but Akismet works very well. For more information please take the time to read “5 things every blogger should know about spam” on this page Akismet: How it works http://akismet.com/how/
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Thanks. I should perhaps have been clearer that it is the spam suddenly turning up on the blog, having slipped by Akismet, that I am seeing a really quite marked increase of. I can of course mark it as spam myself, which is what I have been doing, but it has been going on for a number of weeks now and while I haven’t checked carefully, the ‘names’ of the ‘posters’ are the same, but Akismet does not seem to be picking up on this. Is there anything further I can do, because it must be annoying for people subscribed to comments, for example.
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I don’t understand how any spam comments could annoy your other commenters unless you allow antonymous commenting. If you do then I recommend setting up comment moderation, at least for first time commenters. http://en.support.wordpress.com/settings/discussion-settings/#comment-moderation
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Well, no, but for the people who are emailed every time a comment is made on a certain thread (as per the ‘notify me of follow up comments tick box’), it must be irritating to get an email and think there;s a new comment and actually it is spam. Or is that not how that email function works?
I don’t allow anonymous comments – but I have been getting a lot of comments from people called ‘our website’ and ‘related posts’ lately.
I suppose the solution is to tick the hold comments for moderation before they appear on the blog box in settings, but I’ve been blogging here since 2006 and I’ve never had this problem before, so I wondered what has changed.
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