Spam Filter Free Day: Turn Off Akismet for One Day
November 29th, 2007What happens if you remove your blog spam filters completely for one day? By turning off Akismet, can you manage the huge spam that flows in? Participate in the Spam Filter Free Day and recognize how anti-spam tools are indispensable for the modern blogger.
Can you really turn off Akismet?
I get over 2000 spam comments everyday! Akismet a wonderful anti-spam tool that does a great job of blocking spam on our site. Of couse sometimes Akimset blocks our valid comments too, but you can request them to fix that. It is surprising how much spam inflicts the blogosphere. Some bloggers even use Spam Karma 2 + Akismet + Bad Behaviour 2 to despam Wordpress. It is essential for me to to keep deleting thousands of Akismet blocked spam to keep database backups running and also before wordpress upgrades to reduce database size. In fact, weeding not-spam comments from the Akismet queue is a top blogger time wasting habit.
Jesper Rønn-Jensen is removing all spam protection from his blog on December 15 to highlight how much energy, computer power, network traffic, and manual work is wasted by spam comments and put focus on the effectiveness of spam filters like Akismet. He calls it Spam Filter Free Day. Reading his article was illuminating about the multiple spam filters and related services we will need to disable.
- Disable our secret server-validation (that we use before the comment hits wordpress)
- Disable the plugin that emails subscribers when a new comment arrives
- Disable Akismet
- Disable our blacklist that holds comments for moderation if certain words are in the comment
- Disable the function that holds a comment for moderation if it has a certain number of links
- Disable any plugin that makes spammers gain from the fact that we disable our spam filters. (For instance the “no nofollow” or “dofollow” plugin)
Stop and Block Spam
The spam menace can be appreciated by checking the Live Spam Zeitgeist
3,667,208,575 spams caught so far
7,202,009 so far today
92% of all comments are spam
Amazing!
Don’t be scared to participate. At the end of the day, I am sure you will get thousands of spam comments to moderate, but Akismet makes it easy and fast by simply rechecking the queue and automatically mark all spam comments.
Are you letting spam in for one day? How much time will it take to delete the spam on just that day? And how much time does Akismet therefore save you? Akismet guys want to know.
Update: Lessons learnt from Spam Filter Free Day.
Subscribe RSS feed
Just exactly where is this option to recheck queue for spam??? I can’t quite find it in the user interface of our wordpress admin pages. Am I looking the wrong place?
As you already comment, this feature could come in handy on Spam Filter Free Day
(If it’s there it’s no guarantee that we’ll use the feature — would be too easy. Actually, our point by doing it is that we want to feel the pain for one day without spam filters)
Jesper – In the Wordpress Admin panel, go to Comments > Awaiting Moderation and find the “Recheck Queue for Spam” link on the top right.
One click weeds out all missed spam comments in a jiffy. Very useful in when Akismet outages occur.
He has a point, but do you think that the spammers care about that? I don’t think so. They won’t stop spamming arround.
Have you turned it off? but I don’t see many comments…It will be a real good test…
Unfortunately, not all of the “spam” comments that Akismet catches are actually spam and could actually be doing you a disservice if you want your blog to eventually rank for any keywords in search engines. They may be posting to your blog mostly to create a link back to their own site, BUT people like myself who actually make informed posts on blogs instead of one liners like “nice post, lol” or just a random set of keywords are actually doing bloggers a service. By making an informed post that is actually related to the blog and the topic posted, people like me are trading you content for your site (since comment text is searchable) in exchange for a link back to our site. We help you, you help us.
As long as the comment is relevant and a decent post, it isn’t spam and actually helps your blog rank in Google or Yahoo or any other search engine when someone searches for your blog’s topic. Most people don’t understand this and assume that just because a link goes back to a commercial website, that the comment is to be considered spam and that isn’t true. This is why I don’t go around posting random things on blogs that I find; it’s always related and it’s always a decent sized post, never keyword stuffing or anything related to that.
My website got banned on akismet and it doesn’t work on any wordpress blogs now. As soon i make a comment it shows a blank page which i have understood that it doesn’t even hit the moderation queue so i am completely clueless now. On contacting akismet see what reply did i get..
Hi,
Some bloggers consider your comments to be spam. If your comments are not published on some blogs, it is because the owners of those blogs have indicated that they believe your comments and others like them to be spam.
Kind regards,
Alex.
Akismet is dangerous it impedes free speech and causes problems among people thinking that the person does not like them and does not want to approve their comments!
I think I may focus more on non-akismet blogs than on dofollow blogs :) A comment seen on a nofollow site is better than blocked on a dofollow site. That’s nothing against this blog. Just akismet. If it was a watchdog it might bite the owner instead of the prowler :)
I have a friend that has the same problem – i think they just autoban a certain domain – esp if it doesnt have the same ending (com, co.uk, ie) that the blog has.. just irriating they dont have some sort of proper feedback on this.
I had the same problem – contacted akismet and they said it must be an internal issue of the blog as my website is not on any blacklist. I tried a number of other websites and they all didnt go through so maybe its an IP issue..