Akismet Missed Spam Comments? Recheck the Queue

Akismet is a powerful blog comments antispam tool. It filters thousands of spam comments on this blog and keeps my comments moderation list clean. But what happens when Downtimes or DNS outages occur at Akismet?

“Early in the morning there was a DNS error which caused many clients to be unable to resolve our addresses. I was asleep at the time but the Akismet team fixed the error shortly after it was reported, but unfortunately due to the nature of DNS some clients appear to still be caching the “not found” errors, even 6-7 hours after it’s been fixed.”

Classically when this happens, you login your Wordpress admin and find hundreds of spam comments sitting in your comment moderation queue. Previously you had to mark each such comment as spam and clear your queue.

Since the last 2 versions, Akismet has created a useful link on above the moderation screen called - “Recheck Queue for Spam“. Just click it and Akismet will recheck the entire queue awaiting moderation and clean out all spam. Now even if some DNS outages, Akismet downtime or caching / filtering errors occur, you need not worry and rework Akismet in one click.

As wordpress plugins authors are updating to support wordpress 2.1, now is an excellent time to upgrade to the latest version Akismet 2.0. Want a more powerful antispam solution - use Spam Karma 2 + Akismet + Bad Behaviour 2!