Argh. I was getting innundated with spam a month or so ago, so I activated a new spam filter, Akismet, which is quite powerful — it learns and as it learns it updates a central database which everyone that uses the plugin accesses, so it stays current and gets more accurate as time passes. It’s pretty good, and I haven’t caught any false positives. Until now. Last night my good friend Robbymac emailed to complain about his last few comments getting blackholed. Since he asked, I checked last night and found 26 comments in my moderation queue (all spam, so I deleted them) and 10078 in the Akismet spam bucket, with a total of 44101 spams caught since I installed it a few weeks ago. (This afternoon I have 384 in the bucket with a total of 44589 since installation.) I searched for Robbymac’s name and found one comment to retrieve from the bucket, so it’s live now. Unfortunately Akismet only displays the most recent 150 comments in the bucket, so I couldn’t find any other wayward ones and just deleted what was left.
So… if anyone has any comments not appearing, email me and I’ll try to retrieve it right away so Akismet learns you’re a real person before the comment is lost for good. Along similar lines, if anyone knows how to go farther back than 150 comments in the Akismet bucket, let me know!
I know Jesus says I shouldn’t, but I still hate spammers.
Are you sure you don’t mean you hate the spam, and love the spammers? (read that in your most saccharine voice ;-) … )
Akismet has been working well for me. I have had a couple cases where good stuff has got moderated (that I know of). There are also some times when the server seems to be offline and I get lots of spam coming through that akismet would normally catch, I think.
Hate the spam, love the spammer, but love the spammer with tough love that is indistinguishable from hate.
Glad to hear its working for you… I was looking at it the other day, so now I’ve signed up for an API key. Yeh.. the SPAM is making me crazy too…
Sonja, that very thought ran through my mind when I typed the post, but I just couldn’t…
Len, Randy — Akismet works better than anything else I’ve found without adding validation steps to the comment-posting process. I still have my blacklist and moderation word lists in place, and I do end up with some that slip past Akismet and end up in my moderation queue thanks to the list.