Why is akismet letting spam through all of the sudden?
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I’ve gotten 60-70 “Please moderate:…” emails for comments posted on my blog by spammers in the last week. I’ve never had this problem before, this is all of the sudden.
I changed all my posts to not accept comments and it’s still happening.
When I go to my blog there aren’t any comments to moderate though. It’s all being listed as “ham” in akismet.
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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I too am receiving many spam emails and don’t know what to do about it. The spam always went straight into the spam folders but now, suddenly like you, they are filling up my email. Please help to try sort out.
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I’ll tag this thread for staff to follow up. Please be patient while waiting for a reply.
Meanwhile, make sure that you mark those comments as Spam and don’t simply delete them. Akismet is a learning engine and if you consistently mark Spam messages as Spam it will filter those messages better over time: http://akismet.com/how/
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I get lots of long spam emails from this bozo:
pipertivan
(email visible only to moderators and staff)
46.119.116.133 -
@highbeamassociates
See my advice above.This thread has been tagged for staff, so please be patient for them to respond. They handle support requests based on the timestamps and each new reply bumps this thread to the back of the queue.
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I am experiencing the same problem – an exponential increase in comments that are not being identified as spam. I look forward to it being resolved and await comments on this board.
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This can mean that you approved a spam comment on a post and now the spammers are hammering your blog, but that isn’t necessarily the case.
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. Spam comes in waves. There are human beings who get paid to post spam. There are robotic programs that post 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/
Aksimet is a learning engine. 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.
On the spam that Akismet catches on 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 30 days from the time they were received, and then it will delete the comment automatically.
Set up comment moderation, if you have not already done so, because allowing anonymous commenting on your blog is like putting out the welcome mat for spammers. This page > Settings > Discussion is where you set up defaults for comments. http://en.support.wordpress.com/settings/discussion-settings/
I reduce spam by using this setting:
3. Automatically close comments on articles older than __ days – This setting can be used to have comments closed on articles that are X days old. As an example, if you only want articles to accept comments for 30 days you would check the box and type 30 into the text field. http://en.support.wordpress.com/settings/discussion-settings/#other-comment-settings
And I moderate comments too. Comment moderation http://en.support.wordpress.com/settings/discussion-settings/#comment-moderation
Discussion Settings
Other comment settings
_Comment author must fill out name and e-mail
_Users must be registered and logged in to comment -
Hi there!
To explain a bit further on why you’re seeing more spam: Akismet doesn’t technically let them through, it’s just that spammers are targeting your sites more often and are finding new techniques in slipping through our spam filters. As what TT and Kokkieh have said, it’s a learning engine. The more often you mark spam comments as spam, the more it benefits you and the rest of the WordPress community.
If you find it bothersome receiving an email whenever a comment arrives, you may disable this temporarily by going to Settings -> Discussion in your admin panel, and uncheck “Anyone posts a comment” and “A comment is held for moderation” options under “E-mail me whenever”.
http://en.support.wordpress.com/settings/discussion-settings/#e-mail-me-whenever
For more info on how Akismet works, please feel free to explore this site:
Let me know if you have any other concerns or questions regarding this. Thank you!
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Hi there, I’ve been getting 2 or 3 spam comments a day making it onto my blog in the past month or so. Each time I mark it as spam, but I still keep getting more of them. Is there anything else I can do?
This is one I got today:
“Author : ajax google apis (IP: 104.128.23.21 , 104.128.23.21)
E-mail : (email visible only to moderators and staff)
URL : http://lmgtfy.com/?q=how+to+cancel+google+plus+account
Whois : http://whois.arin.net/rest/ip/104.128.23.21
Comment:
Everything is very open with a precise clarification of the issues.
It was definitely informative. Your website is useful.
Thank you for sharing!”I don’t wish to put comment moderation back on my blog, nor do I want to block comments on older posts. With my audience and my blog, that would be a negative. My posts are evergreen, and my audience is not techy.
Would appreciate any further advice. Thanks! :-)
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@belindapollard
As @druesome explained above, most probably your site is being targeted by human spammers and at the moment they’re managing to slip past the filters. If you keep marking them as Spam it should decrease eventually.If you notice the comments are coming from the same users/emails, try adding those usernames and email addresses to the comments blacklist under Settings ->Discussion, then anything from them will also go automatically into Spam.
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Thanks kokkieh, I don’t think they usually have the same name or email, but I did notice some duplicate IP addresses. Perhaps I could try blocking those…
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Blocking IPs is not always a solution: most websites these days use dynamic IPs, in other words, they use whatever IP is available at the moment. But if those spam comments are consistently coming from the same IPs it could be worth a shot.
Keep in mind that you might end up blocking legitimate comments in the process. All WordPress.com sites, for example, use the same set of IPs which is why, for example, British users find their sites blocked every time British ISPs flag a WordPress site for child pornography or such.
druesome is hopefully also still monitoring this thread, so he might have additional ideas. We’ll see if he responds.
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Thanks for that warning, kokkieh. I actually found it hard to spot the repeat IPs anyway when I went into WordPress, so I won’t bother looking now. I have now opted to moderate any comment containing a link, which will catch quite a few of them at least. (I’d been allowing one link, as some of my genuine commenters include links.)
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