Comments on: Comment Spam – Is Akismet OK?

By: Tor Black

Tor Black — Mon, 28 May 2007 05:11:05 +0000

wow there is a spam blocker named after me?
Kewl!

By: Coding Horror

Coding Horror — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 23:42:07 +0000

Whitelist, Blacklist, Greylist…

I recently got into a spirited discussion about Akismet. What is Akismet? When a new comment, trackback, or pingback comes to your blog it is submitted to the Akismet web service which runs hundreds of tests on the comment……

By: James Thoenes

James Thoenes — Wed, 02 Aug 2006 05:48:12 +0000

Akismet missed it’s first comment spam Sunday on my blog. It was easy enough to spot. I have no idea why anyone would think that would help them.

By: Blaine Moore (Run to Win)

Blaine Moore (Run to Win) — Tue, 01 Aug 2006 13:23:44 +0000

I have been getting hit hard, but very few get through both akismet and my moderation queue. I have a good list of keywords to auto-cause moderation, and a smaller list of keywords to blacklist in a comment.

By: Miriguy

Miriguy — Mon, 31 Jul 2006 05:09:34 +0000

I also receive abundance of spam last week. I installed the SpamKarma 2 plugins, and it finally stop pouring in! Hooray!

By: cardoso

cardoso — Sun, 30 Jul 2006 09:09:29 +0000

All my blog are being spammed twice a day, with 12-hour intervals, usually between 5AM and 9AM EST. Usually it peaks at 400/450% extra pageviews and 250% unique visitors, it’s a big bot farm, I guess.

Akismet (IPraise Thy Name) blocks almost everything. Bad Beahviour takes it’s share, too. The price is low, one or two false positives.

By: Michael Moncur

Michael Moncur — Sun, 30 Jul 2006 05:39:11 +0000

I had a huge surge in attempted comment spam the past few days too. 100% of it was blocked, but there was still enough to notice a serious load on the server. I blocked several offending IPs but the spam was clearly coming in from a botnet with a huge number of machines in different places.

Like others have mentioned, this new attack only hit a couple of my (high pagerank) sites, so those who aren’t having trouble might not have been targetted yet…

I use WP Hashcash, which successfully blocked over a thousand spam comments on the worst day and hasn’t let a single one through in this attack. I haven’t used Akismet so I can’t answer to that.

By: Viper007Bond

Viper007Bond — Sun, 30 Jul 2006 04:01:18 +0000

I use SK2 + BB2. Akismet is alright, but I find SK2 to be WAY more effective, especially when you combine SK2 and Akismet. :)

By: ShoeMoney

ShoeMoney — Sat, 29 Jul 2006 22:24:29 +0000

Hey darren-

Just append that to your .htaccess file.

By: brem

brem — Sat, 29 Jul 2006 18:22:20 +0000

Using Akistmet + Bad Behaviour, and I haven’t noticed any peak in spam. Crossing fingers.

By: Jason Brown

Jason Brown — Sat, 29 Jul 2006 18:18:20 +0000

I have seen this going on for several days actually non stop.

My Internet marketing blog gets hit very heavily though compared to my other blogs, and it is getting rather out of hand

By: Angsuman Chakraborty

Angsuman Chakraborty — Sat, 29 Jul 2006 15:53:41 +0000

I too am seeing a flux of spams. My 15 day count has jumped to 10, 000. It is however less severe than about a month back when it jumped to 25, 000.
None of my spams get to even the moderation queue because I use Akismet in conjunction with a strong but safe comment blacklist. I do not however block comment from open and insecure proxies.

By: Kevin Kennedy-Spaien

Kevin Kennedy-Spaien — Sat, 29 Jul 2006 14:11:43 +0000

This actually started for me just over a week ago. Strangely enough, only blogs on certain subdomains are getting slammed. A lot of the comments actually seem to have nofollow in the links (!) and/or nonsense URLs like “http://www.kluyfvkutdckudf.com/kgxiyyr” (that’s a fake URL) or some such. Very weird.

By: alfred101

alfred101 — Sat, 29 Jul 2006 13:51:09 +0000

Darren at Problogger has been noticing the explosion of comment spam. I too have see it.

Something must have definitely happened at Akisment….

…

By: Aaron Brazell

Aaron Brazell — Sat, 29 Jul 2006 13:47:44 +0000

Haven’t even noticed a blip in Akismet’s coverage….

By: David Turnbull

David Turnbull — Sat, 29 Jul 2006 12:31:13 +0000

I noticed a larger spike of spam today, but Akismet caught it all. Not too bad though – only like 13 spam comments.

By: Ryan

Ryan — Sat, 29 Jul 2006 12:06:46 +0000

Seems like the best solution would be to use a preemptive intelligence check rather than hope to filter it out afterwards using something like Akismet.

I noticed the comments preview plugin for WP lets you create your own captcha (should stop bots being able to use premade captcha busters), and I\’ve also seen a basic question/answer (eg: What colour is an orange?) being used quite effectively on some blogs. The latter would probably be a lot more gentle on server load.

I get as uncomfortable about a system filtering comments as I do about something filtering my emails: not very! The risk of false positives is too much for my liking. :~

By: Abe

Abe — Sat, 29 Jul 2006 11:53:40 +0000

You should get some sort of refund from that AKismet corporate license you got a few months back. =)

By: Alexander

Alexander — Sat, 29 Jul 2006 09:08:07 +0000

Have you tried Bad Behavior yet? I think it works better then Askimet.

By: Scott

Scott — Sat, 29 Jul 2006 08:01:28 +0000

I think for Akismet, if the server is getting stressed and timed out on the spam checking request, Akismet plugin will give up trying and approve the comment (or put it into moderation queue).

Might be a problem with Akismet’s centralised design. Now it gets me thinking — what if Akismet gets DDoS by the bot-net hired by blackhat spammers?