Akismet doesn’t live here anymore
Mar 1st, 2008 by Peter
I have now disabled Akismet spam protection on this blog and hope the best.
Akismet have done a good job so far, but now it seems that it is surpassed by the spambots. The spam comments still fill my “waiting for approval” queue, and I find it annoying to go through these to sort out the one annual real comment.
So far 3 days with no spamming getting past and no bots registering themselves either. I installed Raz-Captcha to stop the bots from doing that, and kept Re-Captcha, to guard against comment spammers. So far so good, but still crossing my fingers. Maybe Akismet will be enabled again, who knows.
Before disabling Akismet, I got loads of spam even though Re-Captcha should have stopped them. So I kept Akismet enabled and had to look through the comments awaiting approval to make sure real comments weren’t lost. A shitty job. I had a clue that it was Akismet’s “fault”, and I was right.
Seems Akismet caught a whole bunch of spam comments just before Re-Captcha did. They should all have been killed at the Re-Captcha process. That’s why it seemed as if Re-Captcha didn’t work properly. So using both was actually a bit over the top and had the opposite result.
Still annoyed that I have to keep the Captcha plugins here. It would be much cooler to be without those spam stoppers, but reality is that they are necessary these days.
So sorry ’bout that reader, but until the next brilliant thing comes along, I’ll have to keep em. Inputs for better ways to keep spam away are of course appreciated.
interesting issue, I’ve been thinking of installing RE Captcha for other reasons and i’ll have to keep that in mind, do you still have Akismet deactivated?
I’ve had entirely the opposite problem with it, it gives you a stats break down of your comments that is entirely bogus. It has caught “SPAM” multiple times now that wasn’t even close to spam ie a ‘false positive,’ yet despite having marked the comment as such the stats says akismet has a 100% accuracy rating and zero false positives.
knowing that it picks up the wrong stuff sometimes, it worries me that its spam counter is also obviously wrong. It never shows me any spam in the queue (it isnt supposed to delete for thirty days) but the counter slowly ticks up (its at 25 now). I KNOW 25 is far too little because another section of the stats break down has it at nearly 2000 (the pie chart) and because before I activated Akismet I was receiving around 20 spam messages a day. In fact since activating it, I have deleted several hundred from Akismet’s caught spam queue personally without waiting for the thirty day deletion period.
something is fishy in the Akismet coding, but I haven’t found any support forums comment thread or posts from others with issues like this.
Hi James,
Sorry for late reply. I have been kinda busy lately.
Actually I have Akismet enabled, but have dropped ReCaptcha again. Instead I have mixed Akismet with Bad Behavior and Spam Karma 2.
Those 3 seem to work fine together, unlike ReCaptcha combined with either (not sure which are winning and which are bad combinations). Either ReCaptcha caught stuff before Akismet or something like that, so spam seemed to get through or mess things up. Been a while since I had those troubles, so not quite sure how it went down.
What I do know, however, is that the recent combo works fine with few glitches. Maybe once every 2-3 months a real spam makes to comments and that I can easily manage to delete. I haven’t seen many (if any?) comments that were genuine get caught without getting a mail that it may be false alarm, so that part seems fine as well.
I have to admit that I have felt forced to close registering for the blog, since that gave way too much trouble. The Captcha plug I used weren’t working 100% of the time (even though you answered correct, you would still be rejected and similar). Problem was that without any plugins, I’d get too many spambots registering, and so I had a hassle deleting those all the time. So I basically just disabled the possibility for good. Seemed suitable now that I’m idling in blogging anyway.
I can’t say that my current combination is suitable for you, since I suspect it also depends on the number of hits you have, but so far I’m happy, and you could try it. That was: Akismet, Bad Behavior and Spam Karma 2.
Just note that this may not catch registering spam.
Tnx for popping by
We’ve had problems with Akismet putting lots of legitimate comments in the trash and so have moved to WP-Spamfree.
Great plugin but occasionally seems to bug out on certain weblogs (normal commenters couldn’t comment).
I second the notion that there is something fishy with Akismet, as whenever we enable Akismet we get thousands of spam comments in the spam queue within days. It’s as if they pump up your spam folder to make sure you are grateful.
@Alec: You could be right. I suspect that I don’t see those problems so much, having a site with less hits. I’ll keep it in mind, if something starts to mess up again. Tnx.
I’m having problems with Aksiment as well. It says that it caught 5 comments, but it’s only displaying two. I want to just go and delete those other three if I can’t view them. I’m going to have to disable Akismet, pathetically bad