Reminder: Check Your Akismet Spam
Just a reminder for all WordPress bloggers - check your Akismet spam in the admin panel from time to time. I just bailed out 9 legit comments. And to think how many comments have wrongfully been marked as spam and deleted. If you ever find that a comment you posted does not automatically appear and your comment does not contain a link or profanity (those go straight to moderation), feel free to email me so I can grab it out of the spam bin. Sometimes I have caching enabled when I expect high traffic and in those cases comments don’t go live until the cache clears out every ~5 minutes.
What do you use for your caching? I use WP-Cache on a regular basis and comments go live immediately after posting.
In that ^ case, my WP-Cache is borked. Mine used to do that but not anymore for some reason.
Hmm, I found one from my blog that didn’t get through.
Have you considered using one of the math comment spam protection plugins for WordPress? I’ve found them very effective. I still use Akismet as a secondary layer of protection but the math protection does such a good job no spam gets past it :-)
akismet sometimes filter out my readers’ comments too. Maybe I should use the math protection as well then… akismet is just acting stranger lately…
Excellent point, Paul. Every once in a while I also find a keeper amongst the ringtones, viagra, gambling, and cialis crap.
I used to do this, but Askimet is catching anywhere from 100-500 spam comments a day lately, and I’m starting to find it unmanageable to scroll through all that hyperlinkage looking for the occasional legitimate comment, especially if I forget for a day or two.
Joshua, if you go to Akismet’s option page there is a checkbox for “Automatically discard spam comments on posts older than a month.” I use that and it makes a huge difference.
I got this just the other day. The poster was kind enough to email me through my contact form, and let me know that his comment had vanished.
Worse, the way my site was set up, it didn’t warn him or anything. I think the warnings are very much reliant on how a theme is set up. It’d be nice if Wordpress itself would handle notifying the user that their comment is pending moderation, or that it’s been considered spam. Maybe there’s a plugin in that to make life easier.
I sometimes do that, but it’s always just spam in there. Considering that Akismet blocked almost 15.000 comments out in 4 months, I can conclude that it’s working great: probably the best spam-killer I’ve ever seen.
Don’t get me wrong - Akismet is great and has blocked close to 150,000 spam comments on this site.. but if it even takes one legit comment away that still means a lot.
I check mine regularly because I once found a few legit comments in there myself. Since then, I check regularly because I would hate to miss a comment - mostly because they’re often from people who haven’t left a comment before and I wouldn’t want to discourage them from commenting again.
This greasemonkey script for firefox makes dumpster diving for comments in Akismet a little less painful.
Akismet Auntie Spam
Maybe something like this but which emails the comment author to update them on the status of their comment would go some way to helping? I’m going to blog about this I think to try to clarify what I mean.
I advice using ‘Bad Behavior’. It blocks (spam)bots before they can post anything at all. That means less work for AKismet :)
I get around 100 spam comments per day, and usually recover one or two “good” ones.
Thanks to mint’s referral logs, I’m proud to say I was one of those 9 that got bailed out of the spam heap.
Oh akismet, what have I done to anger you? Was it my link to an apple rant? I promise to never utter such blasphemy again.
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