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In WordPress.com APIs: HowTo Use Akismet and WordPress.com Stats I talked about Akismet, which is Automattic’s spam-fighting plugin / service. I’ve been quite happy with how well it worked. In a year or so of use over at my other site, only 1 or 2 spam comments ever made it through. I didn’t have a huge volume and read all comments, so they stood out and were easily marked spam and got rid of. Akismet made things easy and to date stopped almost 1300 spams with virtually no effort on my part. Go team!
So there was no doubt in my mind that Akismet would be a vital part of this site. Little did I know that it could also be a big problem, too.
I noticed that none of my comments on other sites were showing up. I figured that maybe they were set to moderate all first posts by a user name and email combo, and no one had gotten around to approving them yet. It went on longer, and I wondered if maybe my sometimes flaky connection was causing me problems. I checked with Michael Martine over at Remarkablogger who had a disclaimer message about moderated comments. He told me that he found my comment in the spam queue instead. Whaaaa?
He very kindly marked me “Not Spam” but as of yet, I’m still on the bad boy list. I did some testing, and it looks like using my name and email with my older domain goes right through as a normal comment, but if I list webmarketinghowto.com as my URL then Akismet will mark it spam. I’ve done this from the same IP, so that’s not it. Maybe someone who previously owned this domain was A Bad Guy?
What Does It Mean To Be Marked A Spammer By Akismet?
While Akismet is great at protecting blogs from spam comments, it’s very success can cause you huge problems if you wind up on the spammer list, because you will now be prevented from commenting at 99% of the blogs running WordPress out there (I just made that figure up, by the way 
) or any other platform that Akismet has developed a plugin for. Since WordPress is one of the most popular blogging platforms out there, you can see how this can hurt you pretty badly. Blogs are all about presenting information and discussion, so you will be locked out of that aspect. Now I could not use my URL, but that won’t help the community aspect much. If I post something interesting (hey, it’s a possibility!) it would be more difficult for people to find other content from me that could be useful or informative.
Not only that, but if I do comment somewhere and the blog admin doesn’t examine his Akismet queue looking for mistakenly-marked legitimate comments, then that will confirm the mistaken judgment, further exacerbating and extending the problem. Spammers certainly are getting more and more creative all the time, and some of their comments are relatively subtle, though I don’t think I’ve posted anything that would be confused for one of these new tricky comments a la “Hello…Man i love reading your blog, interesting posts ! it was a great Sunday” with a link to a celebrity blog or something like that. This was an actual example of a spam currently in my queue over at my other site.
This will also mark your trackbacks and pingbacks as spam, too, so there will be little way to interact with the community outside of forums and email.
HowTo Resolve The Akismet False Positive Problem?
There a couple of things you can do, and hopefully it will not take too long.
First, contact blog owners where you’ve posted and have them check their Akismet queues. They can find your post, look at it, and check the “Not Spam” box. From there, hitting the “De-spam marked comments” will submit this to Akismet so it can learn from it’s mistakes. So far, it’s been a couple-three days with no change. I have no idea how long it takes or how many examples, but I hope it isn’t too many or too long.
Another option is to use Akismet’s contact form in order to ask them to look into the situation. This page uses a basic math question instead of Akismet just for this very reason:
* Note about this question. 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.
There is yet a third option that may help. You might create a post dealing with that very problem, and hoping that they might see it somehow, come to your rescue, thus enabling you to write a fawning “thank you!” post later. I’ll let you know either way.
Has anyone else run into this problem? Did you find other avenues of support?
Tags: Akismet, akismet false positive, akismet problem, akismet problems, false positive, How To, HowTo, WordPress Plugins
22 responses so far ↓
1 Frank C // Dec 23, 2007 at 5:47 pm
I’m having the same problem. It seems that a few people have decided that it’s a good way to get back at people they don’t like by marking their comments or trackbacks as spam. If this trend continues it will destroy the Akismet system.
2 Robert // Dec 23, 2007 at 6:05 pm
It may or may not. If they could come up with some way to tie submissions to the blogs they came from, that might throw up a flag. I’m not sure what information they capture when submitting spam though.
I looked at your site, it didn’t look at all spammy to me. I suppose you’re referring to another one, though.
Thanks for visiting!
3 Frank C // Dec 23, 2007 at 6:19 pm
That’s correct. I’m using it, my VB.NET programming blog, for now so that I can post comments. The one that’s marked as spam is my general purpose blog, optempo -dot- com. It’s not spammy either.
I’m working on a post similar to this one for that blog and I’ll be linking to this post in it. I’ve been checking around and this kind of thing is happening a lot.
4 Robert // Dec 23, 2007 at 6:57 pm
Thanks. I’ve only been doing this one for just less than 2 weeks now, so I didn’t think I’d had time to make enemies yet.
That said, I just found a blog with scraped content hiding amongst the adds. I was both offended and surprised. I think they were actually scraping Digg submissions instead though, as it was just an excerpt.
5 Hal // Dec 24, 2007 at 12:13 am
Yeah, I saw what you meant. I approved the comment (yours), so hopefully it will train the Akismet server. I am a little confused, though, because Akismet told me I had 10 spam comments, but I only saw 5 in the queue… I’ll have to look at the documentation to see if I can recover those other 9 comments (The first was me not knowing what a trackback was, and deleting my own trackback!).
6 Robert // Dec 24, 2007 at 6:50 am
I understand that it doesn’t show duplicate spam (if it’s from the same IP I think?) so you wouldn’t see them all. Also, if you check the “auto delete spam on posts older than 30 days” option you won’t see the older ones, just note that the Akismet number will increment. Spammers like to comment on older posts, thinking maybe you might miss it.
Be aware too, that once Akismet tags it spam, even if you mark it Not Spam, the number of spams Akismet has caught will NOT decrement.
7 Akismet // Dec 24, 2007 at 10:44 am
Sorry for the problem, it should be all fixed up now. Thanks for writing in.
8 Robert // Dec 24, 2007 at 10:51 am
Thanks Matt, that’s very much appreciated. Fawning thank you post to follow later today sometime.
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12 Albuquerque Homes // Dec 28, 2007 at 4:01 am
I found you via Michale Martines site. I have this same problem. There are very few sites where I make it pass Akismet. I have tried having blog owners mark me as not spam and have limited luck with that. They do but I still hit the spam folder. I contact Aksimet so hopefully will get better luck there.
13 Robert // Dec 28, 2007 at 6:49 am
You’re good, you weren’t marked spam and the comment went in normally.
14 Peter // Dec 28, 2007 at 7:19 pm
This morning I noticed a lot of incoming traffic to a similar piece I wrote about Akismet a few months ago. In fact it looks like there are several bloggers complaining about them and their product. For all it’s worth, I’m glad to see that it’s not just me with this problem. Maybe now they will finally start responding to complaints and try to resolve the issue?
15 Matt // Dec 28, 2007 at 10:31 pm
Mr “Albuquerque Homes,” maybe you should try signing your comments with your NAME instead of the keywords you’re trying to search engine optimize for. Doesn’t nofollow make that pointless anyway?
16 Robert // Dec 29, 2007 at 6:59 am
Per http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nofollow it (for Google, at least) won’t pass Page Rank but it will follow the link but won’t index it. If the page is already indexed, it will count it as a backlink. I suppose it’s still helpful, but less so than if there were no NoFollow.
17 Sean // Dec 30, 2007 at 1:04 am
I run WP but not on wordpress.com. Is there a way I can access the spam queue? I mistakingly marked a good comment as spam.
Thanks.
18 Robert // Dec 30, 2007 at 7:32 am
If you marked it as spam and then deleted it, it’s gone. If you just marked it spam, you can go the the Comments admin page, and select Akismet Spam. Once you find the actual comment, check the “Not Spam” box and hit the “De-spam marked comments” button to recover it.
19 Rome // Dec 30, 2007 at 5:04 pm
Hi Robert. I tried leaving a comment using my blocked URL. Hope you unflag it.
Really need all the help I can get.
Have you been lifted from the blacklist already?
20 Sean // Dec 31, 2007 at 1:57 am
Thanks for the suggestion. Unfortunately, I don’t have Akismet Spam on my Comments Admin page.
21 Robert // Dec 31, 2007 at 6:07 am
You don’t have that subpage, or the Akismet spam queue itself is empty? In the first case, something’s wrong with your Akismet. In the second, you’ve already deleted the comment; it’s too late.
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