A number of ProBlogger readers have been emailing me of late to say that comments that they are leaving here are not appearing and that it seems they are being marked as spam incorrectly.
I use Akismet and have noticed this happening a little more than normal lately. I’ve talked to the team at Akismet and they have told me that my blog is in the top few in terms of quantities of comment spam and that as a result there have been a few more false positives than normal. Due to the thousands of spam comments that they filter each day it was impossible for me to scan through them all looking for such mistakes.
If your comments have been filtered out in this way could you please let me know. I just noticed that Akismet have added a search function which allows me to search for email addresses, URLs, names etc. Of course I need to know what I’m looking for – so if your comments are being filtered here please contact me with the name, email address and URL that you use in comments and I’ll look for them and mark them as ‘not spam’ which hopefully will fix the issue.
Feel free to test whether you’re being marked as spam by leaving a comment below.
I’m not sure when the search functionality was added to Akismet (it could have been there for weeks as I’m not one for details) but it’s a welcome feature!
update: I should also mention that in addition to Akismet I also have some manual moderation to do – particularly for first time commenters who all go into the queue for my manual moderation. So if this is your first comment it doesn’t mean you are being filtered as spam. If in doubt – contact me.
I’ve got some mobile home insurance I’d like to sell you :)
-Brian (who looks through all his Akismet spam because he once found his own comment on his own blog in there)
At least the comments that I have left in the recent post have not been impacted by this filtering you are telling !
I’ve never found a better excuse to leave a comment – I’ve been called spam by Akismet on at least 2 other sites. So here’s a test for both of us…
Nope. Never had this problem. Recently I added Bad Behavior plugin in addition to spam karma and akismet.
That has kept spam down to almost zero in addition to a cool contact form plugin.
Yes Bad behavior did knock out some comments. But since there were only 10 to look through, I did not have miss out on comments.
Don’t know what SK2 and Akismet marked as spam. Impossible to go through 100’s of spam daily.
Cheers!
Alpesh
I think I have only had one comment that didn’t get through. It was a rare comment in that I included a link.
It could be that any links trigger the system on high traffic blogs. I am certainly not blacklisted from leaving comments anywhere and always try to add to the conversation.
If you add a first line of defence such as changing the comment script URL and adding a math plugin, maybe they could tone down the algorithm.
I use Akismet too and recently, I’ve been getting quite a bit more spam. One day I got 9 come though in an hour that Akismet missed. Now that’s not a lot, but compared to the 0 that I normally get with Akismet, 9 was a lot. ;)
Weird, Askismet was working alright, but as the last poster said it’s begun missing it’s target. Bleh
hey D-
Dillsmack wrote a akismet whitelist plugin if you find someone is banned and you want to let them pass cause its a false positive… here is the address-
http://www.dellanave.com/blog/2006/11/27/akismet-with-local-whitelist/
All of my comments have gone through fine Darren. Mind you, I never drop links or discuss the 3 P’s in my comments ;)
Matt
Last I knew I was a “spammer” here even though i’ve been linked to by darren. Never know though, maybe I got unblocked.
Kris
I’m having similar problems Darren. My name should link thru to my post on the subject. Let’s hope it doesn’t trigger akismet. ;-)
I’ve been going into moderation every once in a while. Thought I had earned some trust around here. :)
Often, I feel like the comments I read on here actually *are* spam — i.e., they’re comments that are nothing but some snippet of somebody else’s blog piggybacking on your posts, written purely in an effort to boost the Google ranking of the other blog. You write “X” and then somebody posts a comment that says “Darren wrote X.” It’s not really a comment at all — it’s just a feeble excuse to create a link.
Alex perhaps you need to learn the difference between spam and trackbacks ;)
LOL, I wondered what he was talking about.
I think that Alex is right in a way, but it does promote people’s sites who visit the blog, which I don’t think is bad. It supports it’s base while supporting the site as well.
When that happens you should also make sure to give the false positives some love. I think they use Bayesian filters like any other spam filters so it’s just as important to “unspam” comments marked as spam.
I wish I had a false positives problem. ;)
Well, there’s some problem with akismet lately as I got a few spam comments that were not filtered out.
rarely do mine get through… i thought u just didnt like me darren!
It seems I can’t find the comments I left here before. Let me try if this one can be found.
By the way, within 3 months of the launch of our blog, the spam comments have been increasing rapidly, from a few per day now to over 100 per day. It’s time we consider using one of the spam filters suggested here.
Darren, I’ve never seen a problem on your site with my comments getting through but have recently experienced problems elsewhere.
Would you be interested in purchasing some Volcano insurance?
Well, I have had all my comments that I wrote, getting filtered. I stopped commenting about a month back, though I did use your contact form.
Let us see if this comment gets through. :)
[…] Update 1/18/07 4:34am PST: And here’s Darren Rowse from Problogger expressing concern over Akismet’s spam filtering (emphasis mine): I use Akismet and have noticed this happening a little more than normal lately. I’ve talked to the team at Akismet and they have told me that my blog is in the top few in terms of quantities of comment spam and that as a result there have been a few more false positives than normal. Related PostsOver 90% of blog comments are spam, reports AkismetAkismet first catch a false positiveMullenweg on Comment spam […]
Darren – I found your post especially interesting as Matt told me in the comments about the issue that he wouldn’t want our blog’s “statistical improbable experience” [with Akismet overzealous spam filtering] to “leave a lasting negative impression.
Sometimes my comments get held for moderation and never show up. I thought you were just busy though. :)
I have been having problems on other blogs too. One of mine may have been blocked here. Thanks for letting us know. I was wondering what was going on.
Cross your fingers, lets hope this all works.
Darren,
I was one of those who e-mailed you. My problem was not with the comments I posted but with the pingbacks. I reffered to your articles on my blog in the past. But since I e-mailed you I have not commented on your blog, so here it goes…
think trackbacks are a different issue than this one.
I think all my comments have gone through. But my trackback didn’t appear on one of your posts that I linked to – that might be my WordPress blog not pinging properly, not sure…
Hey Darren,
I have been a regular visitor/reader of your blog and a not-so-regular commenter (Ahem!). I have noticed that almost always my comments do not get posted right away and it takes time (sometimes it has taken quite a bit) for my comments to appear. I’d assume that they are being manually moderated. While I am happy just to be able to read my comments on your blog, I’d love for them to appear faster. I kinda get anxious at times.
Nevertheless, I appreciate the fact that you care about your reader community that leaves regular comments on your blog.
Cheers!
Siddharth Thakkar
Hey Darren,
I just posted a comment here and it was approved automatically and appeared on your blog right away! Thanks for caring!
Cheers!
Siddharth Thakkar
Man, what a well set-up website!
I’ve just add a comment, it seems to be ok…
Fourth try … different URL.
Darren … winner! It’s the .i-n-f-o URL that makes me get marked as spam.
Crap!
Testing the .net version. Might as well, I just made 12 other comments here. :-)
It seems to be something based on domain name. I can not use one without ending up in moderation with any dot-extension, but I use a different URL and it goes straight through.
Testing one more time from Safari (all the original ones were Firefox). No domain this time. The first 2 tests from Safari had my domain in the website box.
Nikole – your comments were just caught in the moderation queue.
So why does the .info go to spam? That comment still hasn’t posted. The .com comment is posted right away. :-(
My comments are being filtered everywhere I go :( This is really unfortunate, perhaps I was even writing TOO MUCH in comments.
Yep, that was it. Problem solved for me.
Testing your Akismet feature.
I’ve been posting at some blogs and sometimes the comment does not appear. When that happens, I don’t see the “your comment is awaiting moderation” message. I didn’t know if it was Akismet.