Is Akismet Wrongly Blocking Your Not-Spam Blog Comments?
Do your posted blog comments never go live? Do blog owners have to find your comments from heaps of spam? Are you always contacting bloggers about missing comments and angry with them for deleted comments? It is happening to us for last few months. Akismet, a popular anti-spam wordpress plugin had labeled our comments as spam and actively blocked them across the thousands of wordpress blogs where it is active. This issue could be affecting you too…
Akismet Blocks WordPress Comment Spam
Akismet is a powerful tool to block spam comments on your blog, in fact it blocked over 400,000 spam comments since this blog started. But the intelligent spam solution might interpret your valid, non-spam comments as spam and block them.
When a new comment, trackback, or pingback comes to your blog it is submitted to the Akismet web service which runs hundreds of tests on the comment and decides if it is spam. It saves the spam in the database for 15 days in case you want to check it out manually and then automattically deletes it. You can also enable an option to “Automatically discard spam comments on posts older than a month”. Thus, if Akismet decides to block your comments, it blocks them on all blogs where Akismet is activated (since Akismet comes preinstalled, that is a lot of WordPress blogs!)
When Akismet Wrongly Blocked Our Comments
I was first notified of the issue by a few friendly bloggers, who had to dig around their spam queue to find my comments. I had to contact some bloggers to trace my missing comments too. So obviously Akismet has to be tweaked to fix the spam labeling issues.
I checked the Akismet FAQ for a solution.
“Akismet is catching a regular comment as spam!
Don’t worry, if you see a regular comment on your Akismet page, just click the “Not Spam” checkbox and submit and the comment will be sent back to Akismet as a mistake. The system will learn from your submission, though it may take a day or so in some cases. False positives, as they’re called, are extremely rare and we watch them closely.”
Though a few bloggers were kind enough to actually find and label our comments as “not spam”, it was not enough to get our comments out of the Akismet blacklist.
After continued blockage of comments for the last few months, and no solution in sight, I contacted Akismet. In the feedback form I selected “I have a support or feature request” button and proceeded to describe my problem. And then I was surprised to see a math puzzle to keep out automated spam, but they read my mind as written below was -
“You might wonder, if these guys are so good at spam blocking why would they put a stupid question like this on their contact form to keep spam out? Well, Akismet is great at protecting contact forms, we use it on all our other sites, but on Akismet.com sometimes people use the contact form to tell us they’re being blocked by Akismet.
If you think about that, blocking people when they’re trying to tell us they’re wrongly blocked would probably frustrate them, hence the math question.”
In a few days, the nice folks at Akismet sent me a reply that they had fixed the issue. And indeed the comments are going live now. It was a frustrating experience for me to post comments and never see them go live. Now I feel like commenting again…
Is Akismet blocking your valid comments on other blogs?
« Previous Post Next Post »
I agree with you on this. I have encountered quite a few times when my comments simply did not go live because I had a hyperlink on my comment.
If this is the only parameter that anti-spam tools use to judge spams then I am afraid, I will never go for one on my blog..
Great! I think you were lucky here. I had a similar problem and Akismet never considered replying to my email. I wonder if this comment will end up in your spam bin :P
Could you give us an example of a post that was recognized by Akismet as spam?
I have found a couple of situations in which the comments caught by Akismet were not particualrly mass produced and spewed by some “mass posting” program however the content was weak.
You know one or two liners with some stuff like “Nice post, Keep up the good work.” Yu know stuff that was totally non-contributive to discussion.
Some times it’s a friend trying to get my attention. So I delete it and shoot them an email thanking them for dropping by blah blah blah. I don’t even say I deleted it or ask them not to contactme in that way. It’s all good. They get the picture.
Sometimes it’s just someone doing drive-by linking for backlinks. Some of these people I know it’s not just some nameless being from eastern Europe.
That’s why I asked what was initlly caught of yours by Akismet? I find it catches junky comments–from any source.
BTW, I think it’s very easy to scan down a list and “train” Akismet that indeed such and such item is not “spam”
Wihtout Akismet can you imagine the deluge we’d have to contend with?
Akismet save me a lot of time.
@Anand – You can configure Comment moderation in WordPress to activate moderation when a comment has 1 or more links. But that is independent of Akismet. You can also block comments by email, IP etc.
@Thilak – You comment just went live. Akismet likes you.
@Nia – I don’t know which comment actually got us blocked. I guess you need a series of spam comments to get Akismet to flag you as spam. I think that we should avoid posting comments like “Nice site”, “Great job” etc. which actually resemble spam. Comments need to add to the discussion. I cannot imagine blogging without Akismet – its truly great.
That happened to me too, but it’s fixed now after I contacted them.