| 02/06/2007 |
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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?
See AlsoTags: #Blogging #Security #Tips #WordPress
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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.
Well, the risks of the job. You can’t always get away with spammy comments. Or, you can always stumble upon someone who will flag you as spam just for the heck of it. It happened to me more than once. So you are also at the discretion of people and their moods.
yEs akismet is blocked me too, Now I contacted with akismet publishers and I’m waiting, I don’t know what I did wrong :S ….
Dont leave super short comments like “Good article” or “Excellent” since most of such comments will be marked as spam by admins.
And if Akismet gets too many such “spam marked” comments, your filter is tripped and your comments will always land up in Spam on all blogs using Akismet.
thanks
I agree w/Tasarim. It’s frustrating not to know what you did to get blacklisted. The Akismet service is great, but false positives aren’t :-(
That’s good to here, I actually ran into the same problem a week or so back, for some reason I couldn’t post on other peoples blogs, I realized it must of been Akismet, so I gave them an email and about a week later I was unblocked. I have also noticed this on my own blog, a few of my readers get their comments blocked. I guess these kind of errors happen occasionally when they have so many other spam comments, but when it comes down to it they are generally pretty accurate at spam detection.
“You are posting comments too quickly. Slow down.” Yeah, if I’m posting too quickly then I better slow down from 3-4 times per week. I’ve removed it from my blog completely. If Matt has better things to do than keep up with his plugin he needs to hand it over to someone that will actually do something positive with it, like catch real spam.
Everytime I try to drop a link on someone’s “do follow” blog, I get a blank page. I do not, nor have I ever spammed anyone’s site. I do drop a link to my website, but I also provide a well-though out comment to offset the link drop.
Am wondering if a lawsuit can be filed against Askimet, charging them with tortuous interference with a business and challenging them to prove that my site is “spam”.
We’ve actually removed Akismet from all of our client sites. The issues with false positives (we had a medical doctor’s blog average about 85% false positives with no response from Akismet on the issues) to getting blacklisted by Akismet ourselves showed us that that service was not for us. We moved to a self hosted anti spam solution running off of Spam Assassin and now we can monitor ourselves what is occurring.
Yeah. Me too. They are blocking my comments Y_Y
I dont know if they are blocking me. Please tell me if they are
I wrote to akismat and they fixed the problem for me
Thanks for this post, I’ve been looking around and reading up on why my comments are not getting posted. I’ve had the issue before and went through the whole contact Akisment cycle. They where pretty nice and helped as much as they can.
Hopefully this comments goes through!! :)
Hi
I have the same issue when leaving comments on blog and just did as you suggested. I contacted them and hopefully they will remove us from their blacklisted list as we are a genuine business commenting on post.
I’ll wait to hear from them.
Thanks for the great info.
thanks, I’ll need to contact them as well…ugh
oh dear, I have the same problem with akismet. Thank you for your information, it will help a lot
Akismet has saved me from some massive headaches, BUT, I frequently have to sift through the spam queue to approve non-spam comments. It’s annoying, but has become as standard practice.
I can’t comment on any WordPress blogs at all. Hopefully Akismet staff would get back to me soon.
If your running this program you are doomed. Akismet is blocking everything. Yes it does get some spam, but it gets alot of legit comments that have links to legit sites. I no longer run it because it ran several of my blogs search engine rankings into the ground. There are alot better spam blocking software out there. Just remember Akismet claims that linking to any site where spam is coming from is bad. This is not true. If your site is a blog and even if the comment is a one liner like nice blog, if it has a backlink to a relevant site with page rank it helps your SEO. Not to mention the traffic helps your alexa rankings. Google understands blogs and gives more credit for who you link to than comment content. Akismet denies this, but trust me unless you have a .edu, .gov or .mil this software will drive your traffic and SEO into the ground. Just do a search on Google and see how many people are going away from it.
I wish there was a way to view the blacklist. It seems to hit me quite a bit and I really don’t blog comment all that often.
Many unique individuals here. ,
Astute comments are a great way to generate links but occasionally you do get on the Akismet list if you do not use your own name. Thus, to some of the posters above, it may not be your comment…it may be the name that you used…like “LCD TV”…I don’t know if anybody has that name ;)
One tip for how to get out of the database is to comment on another blog you own and mark that comment as “not spam”
I’m having a huge problem with getting blocked at the moment. I don’t know why, as I’ve never done anything that could remotely be called spamming.
Lets see if this actually gets through. It seems a bit random, depending on the exact words you use in the message.
i hate when my comments get blocked. it makes me so sad
the hardest thing about blog commenting are the captchas. i have not so good vision and this makes it worse
i hate captchas, they make me not want to leave comments
Very informative article
Great article. I do have one question that I’d love to get your advice on though pertaining to the topic. How do you find tweeps who are more on your level of popularity?
For instance, many of the people I follow are business men or tech writers, or even celebrities. While I find their tweets interesting and do try to interact with them, these are not always the best people to build these “meaningful relationships” with.
So how do I find the “smaller” or less popular people on twitter who are interested in the same topics I am and, more importantly, willing to build the same meaningful relationship with me?