Is Akismet Sick or Did I Piss Off the Spammers Too Much?!

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Spam Momma I know I was a bit harsh on the spammers yesterday.

I don’t know if I am paying for it today or not.

I have gotten more of that crappy “smart spam” in the last 24 hours than I have in the last week.

But you’d think that the “real spam” would be going to it’s proper place - the Akismet Trash Bin. But again, in the last 24 hours, Akismet is missing one out of every five spam comments and sending them to me for moderation. I went and upgraded my Akismet plugin yesterday thinking that would help.

It didn’t.

Anyone else having this problem lately, or did I just plant myself on the wrong side of the spam war yesterday?!

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Comments

1. On July 10th, 2007 at 3:48 pm, Christy said:

Seeing you dressed in a spam can is just about the funniest thing I’ve ever seen!! LoL.

Sorry you have been having difficulties. On a brighter note I’ve given you a Thoughtful Blogger Award, you will find all of the details on my Writer’s Reviews.com blog. You deserve it for all you do to help others out here in the blogoshpere!

Christy:)

2. On July 10th, 2007 at 4:08 pm, Aaron M. Potts said:

It’s not just you, Wendy! I’ve been getting LOADS of additional SPAM today, and all of it in the same format that Akismet usually catches.

p.s. - You look smokin’ hot in that can…

3. On July 10th, 2007 at 4:23 pm, Charity said:

Ugh, me too and it’s getting old. I’m using Akismet and another simple plugin called Moderate Brief Comments by Kaf, which helps to separate those sneaky one-word comments, but it’s still tiresome. I know I’ve had at least 17 today. Then I stopped counting. What a waste of time.

4. On July 10th, 2007 at 4:39 pm, Leigh said:

*hehe* I just Love your fashion statement.

It seems to come in waves for me, the last few days have been bad. It is usually the same few very old posts that they reply to as well and it is the same spam that is caught at other times.

I had thought about closing old post, but I would really rather not do that.

has anyone had any addition luck with the additional question when replying, 5+2 etc or the bad behaviour plugins?

5. On July 10th, 2007 at 5:11 pm, derek said:

I haven’t seen an increase in the number getting through Akismet but I have seen an increase in what Akismet has been catching recently.

Love that picture!

6. On July 10th, 2007 at 5:11 pm, Lincoln said:

Nice blog got you, very good write stuff . come visit my blog give me traffic good good!! gamble and loans we give!

Just kidding.

I’ve been been using Bad Behavior as a complement to Akismet and so far it’s worked pretty well. One thing I’ve noticed though, there seems to be a loophole that if a pingback is dated really old, (like 1969) it might pass right through the filters AND without any notification. This happened to me and I never received any notification of getting pingback, and yet there it was, advertising lovely ways that women could…. ok that’s not really important.

The point is that it slipped right by me. :O

7. On July 10th, 2007 at 5:13 pm, Lincoln said:

BTW, I heard using Akismet along with Spam Karma has reportedly been the best combination of plugins you can use to stop spam.

8. On July 10th, 2007 at 5:16 pm, derek said:

I don’t know how many of you have your blogs configured to send you an email whenever there is a new comment/trackback on your site but I use that feature and have caught a few spam trackbacks on old posts that way.

Obviously this could be a problem if you receive a ton of email. However, you can set yourself up with a special email account to be used just for that purpose and then scan through there when you have the time.

9. On July 10th, 2007 at 5:52 pm, Tammy Lenski said:

Wendy, I use Akismet and Spam Karma together and in the last few days I’ve STILL seen a jump in stuff getting through. I want to meet the people who buy things from spam, since they’re the ones who help this annoyance continue. Ugh.

10. On July 10th, 2007 at 6:53 pm, Phil said:

I’ve been using Akismet and Bad Behaviour and have had very few problems for a long time, particularly since the latest Akismet upgrade too.

Maybe you upset a lot of spammers, maybe someone did buy some comments just to get to you, maybe Akismet is under a lot of stress at the moment, either way, I’d certainly recommend getting something else is to back it up.

Also, like most others reading this now, I definitely want to know where you got the SPAM outfit from?!

11. On July 10th, 2007 at 9:18 pm, David Culpepper said:

I’m with you… yesterday I received more spam than I had in the last month. I use Bad Behavior and Spam Karma and much like you I would estimate 1 in 5 made it through. Thankfully, today has been much better.

12. On July 10th, 2007 at 9:41 pm, Karen W. said:

It’s The Law of Attraction: your mad about spam, you’re thinking about spam so bam: you GET spam

If you don’t buy that Darren over a ProBlogger mentioned an e-mail he got in which a black-hat SEO company is now “selling” blog comments

13. On July 10th, 2007 at 10:45 pm, Goal Setting College said:

I’ve installed askismet since the day I started and it has never really given me much problems though I admit I haven’t got as much comments as you probably have. By the way, your outfit’s fabulous! Haha.

Cheers, Ellesse

14. On July 11th, 2007 at 12:57 am, Dennis Bjørn Petersen said:

I read on shoemoney yesterday that Jeremy uses dillsmacks akismet, a whitelist combined with Askimet.

You can read his article here
http://www.shoemoney.com/2007/07/05/why-does-my-comment-not-show/
and find more about the whiteliste here:
http://www.dellanave.com/blog/2006/11/27/akismet-with-local-whitelist/

15. On July 11th, 2007 at 6:48 am, Homemom3 said:

I seem to get a lot of it for the blog over at 451press, but my homemom3 doesn’t seem to get much. Course then again I wouldn’t really know as I have a spam box and just delete, delete, delete all day. Not really sure where all that comes from. But the 451 blog gets a TON of it.

Cute outfit. lol.

16. On July 11th, 2007 at 9:04 am, Jon - SmartWealthyRich said:

Wendy, you were not harsh on the spammers yesterday, they deserve the harshness! imo

Regarding the akismet thing, it’s the same thing with my blog, I don’t get it.

Hey really nice costume by the way lol

PS: this is not a paid comment

17. On July 11th, 2007 at 9:44 am, Christy said:

Please visit my website at:

“ClickMyGoogleAdsense.com”

(Sorry, I couldn’t resist!)

This is the first time I’ve ever heard about “paid comments.” This brings a whole new fakeness to the blogging world. I think that if a blogger has to pay for comments they are doing something very wrong.

18. On July 11th, 2007 at 10:30 am, Loretta said:

Lovely fashion statement there Wendy The whole spam thing is such a mess lately, paid spamming and comments and crap landing in our inboxes.

19. On July 11th, 2007 at 11:47 am, JoLynn Braley said:

Wendy, the Spam Can is hilarious, is that a Halloween costume?

In addition to Akismet, I also use the Bad Behavior plugin. I haven’t noticed an increase in spam so it might be because I’m running both plugins.

20. On July 11th, 2007 at 12:00 pm, Brown Baron said:

I’ve noticed that Akismet has been catching a lot more spam in the last few days.
Great costume

21. On July 11th, 2007 at 12:24 pm, Roberto Alamos said:

WAHAHAHA you look so funny that way

Well, I have not seen any increment in my blog’s spam but I have seen it on my gmail and google hosted email accounts these days. That’s weird and pretty annoying >:(

22. On July 13th, 2007 at 9:23 pm, Genesis said:

Nope, it is not just you. I have had SO much spam in the past couple of days, and half of it is not being caught! What a pain. It takes a few seconds longer to moderate each spam message and I can only imagine how many you have to deal with, if I´m getting upwards of 25-40 a day!

23. On July 14th, 2007 at 8:20 pm, katiebird said:

Hi Wendy,
I was getting sometimes 1000 spam comments a day (does health care just attract that sort of thing?)

And 3-5 pretty horrible comments would make it past Akismet too.

I noticed that virtually ALL Spam Comments were on VERY old posts. So I started shutting off comments on the oldest posts.

I found a plug-in called, Comment Time-out that shuts off comments after a set period of time.

And, Spam comments have almost completely stopped (I’m down to maybe 1-3 a day)

I set the time to 2 weeks, but it could be set to anytime.

I can’t recommend anything more highly.

24. On July 20th, 2007 at 7:09 am, cooliojones said:

To date, my Akismet has only caught one spam comment, so I guess that’s a good thing! Do you have to edit any comments?

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