Why doesn't Akismet do a better job of killing spam?

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  ednisley · Member · Mar 6, 2014 at 1:47 pm

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  Although Akismet reports that it’s killing nearly 1000 spams/day for my blog, it’s also putting 150 spams in the moderation queue for my attention every day. That rate doesn’t appear in any of their statistics, but the percentage seems to be rising and the absolute number is definitely increasing.

  Day after day after day, the queue has 150 nearly identical comments, but Akismet remains unable to “learn” to discard them; obviously, their algorithms aren’t working and my feedback isn’t helping.

  A few simple rules would identify the spam in the queue:

  – More than two non-ASCII UTF characters that resemble ASCII glyphs
  – More than 25 lines or four paragraphs of text
  – More than four misspelled words
  – More than four of these characters: {}()[]|
  – Boldface emphasis in the first line
  – A user ID containing more than two words
  – A user ID that’s a URL
  – A user URL with more than one path component
  – A user URL invoking a PHP script

  The existing text-based filtering on the Settings -> Comment page aren’t helpful; simple string matching doesn’t work.

  It would be helpful to let us enable / disable / configure the new controls, but right now I’d settle for overkill.

  You folks obviously have some mojo with Akismet, so how about helping them improve their game?

  Thanks…

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

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  gracejiyoung · Member · Mar 7, 2014 at 11:32 pm

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  Hi Ed,

  Thanks for your suggestions! I have forwarded this on to our Akismet team. If they need any further information they will follow up with you via email.

  Thanks!