Written on August 28th, 2006 at 09:08 am by Darren Rowse
Akismet Suffers Comment Spam Downtime
Akismet users might have noticed an increase in comment spam getting through the system over the past 24 hours. It seems that they had some downtime as a result of an update that allowed quite a bit of spam to get through.
It seems to have settled now but for a few hours there last night I was swamped with the stuff (I was deleting it only just as fast as it was coming in). It made me realize just how much spam they usually stop for me (my counter shows that it’s stopped just under 22,000 comment spams in the last 15 days).
All is back up and running now - sorry for those of you who were exposed to the crud that was through my comments last night and to those who had trouble commenting (I switched to a higher level of moderation for a while there).
21 Responses to “Akismet Suffers Comment Spam Downtime”
Ryan Wagner
August 28th, 2006 10:07 am
I was wondering what happened. I ended up switching to Spam Karma and I can’t believe that I never used it before! I thought Akismet was good but Spam Karma is amazing with how many settings it has. If you want more control over the spam comments then you should check it out.
Pete Cashmore
August 28th, 2006 10:14 am
Same issue here - woke up to 1000+ spam comments. Makes you realize how good Akismet really is.
Matt
August 28th, 2006 10:39 am
Sorry about the trouble that the downtime caused, I hope it wasn’t too many spam for you.
Manblogging! » Oh Akismet, I Missed You So
August 28th, 2006 10:41 am
[…] You don’t know what ya got ’til it’s gone. I didn’t realize how much time Akismet saves me until I came home from Little Miss Sunshine last night and found dozens of comments waiting in my inbox. Most of them were held for moderation, thanks to the rule that automatically holds any comment with more than two links in it. Still, since I don’t have a moderation delay for new commenters, a couple slipped onto The Zero Boss. TZB has been around in some form for over two years, and has close to 2,000 posts on it, so for a few hours the onslaught was intense. From the sound of it, though, popular sites like Problogger had a dickens of a time, so I’m counting my good fortune. (It may be the first time that being relatively unknown served as an advantage.) Share and Enjoy:These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. […]
Martin
August 28th, 2006 11:18 am
Phew, it wasn’t just me then - I had a massive surge in comment spam over the weekend.
As Pete said, Akismet being down actually shows how good a job they’re doing because I’ve hardly thought about comment spam for months now.
Jay Andrew Allen
August 28th, 2006 12:52 pm
I checked my email last night, saw the spam, and thought, “Oh crap - the Internet just threw up on my blogs.” I was happy to find everything back in working order today.
Matt, dude, don’t apologize (though it’s nifty you did). You guys have done so much for the blogging community.
truongn2
August 28th, 2006 2:26 pm
That is why you should have at least two spam catcher as a fail-safe.
cardoso
August 28th, 2006 3:00 pm
I noticed a lot of false positives, too. Usually 4 or 5 a day. Well, hope they solve it, I can´t start to imagine my life without Akismet.
Darren Rowse
August 28th, 2006 3:33 pm
was a little freaky at first Matt but once i upped my moderation levels I got on top of it.
Donncha O Caoimh
August 28th, 2006 3:47 pm
A while back I looked at the Akismet Worst Offenders plugin. It’s a modification of the original which groups spam from the same IP or hostname together for easy deletion.
Definitely recommended for reviewing the Akismet Queue.
Adnan
August 28th, 2006 8:23 pm
Yeah I’ve got to say also - you don’t realise how good Akismet is until it breaks or stops working. Well done to Matt and the team at Akismet for the good work so far! I don’t know what I’d do without you!
Pete Cashmore
August 28th, 2006 9:10 pm
Hey Matt,
No need to apologize - Akismet rocks.
jhay
August 28th, 2006 11:48 pm
I guess I was a bit lucky. No spam comment made it through to publishing because I had first-time comments to be hold on moderation enabled and that did the trick and spared me from those damned spammers.
I tried the Spam Karma 2 and Akismet Combo but in my experience SK2 seemed to have overruled Akismet in some cases because some spam got through. I dropped Spam Karma and settled with Akismet and since then my blog has been spam free.
Thomas
August 29th, 2006 12:04 am
I guess I can turn off Spam Karma now. I was wondering what happened. Maybe there needs to be a ‘news’ block of text in Akismet that alerts when things like this might happen. I almost thought badly of the plugin. ;)
Bill Nadraszky
August 29th, 2006 12:07 am
22,000 comments in 15 days? That is 1500 pieces of spam a day! I currently use movable type and have resisted moving to Wordpress because I am not sure of the features that I would gain for the work it would take to move over but Askimet seems like a good enough reason on it’s own.
Has anyone checked to see if Askimet has many false positives when scaning for spam?
Akismet Spam Plugin Went Down, Briefly. » BloggerDesign.com : Design Optimization Usability
August 29th, 2006 12:10 am
[…] It turns out that Akismet was down over the weekend for some updates. All should be good now though. […]
Spam Attack at CREEations
August 29th, 2006 3:50 am
[…] Spam Attack Published August 28th, 2006 in Announcements, Life Tags: Announcements, Life. Tags: Announcements, LifeUPDATE: Apparently the spam problem wasn’t on my end at all. The program I use to get handle on it (Askimet) experienced down time. It happened to coincide with my updating to a newer version of WordPress. Go figure. ProBlogger and BloggingPro both wrote about the problem this morning. I’m glad I wasn’t dealing with their traffic levels yet, eh? Scores of spam comments are relatively manageable compared to thousands! Please bear with me. I’ve been having some technical issues over the last couple of days. […]
Blonde Jon
August 29th, 2006 11:59 am
I actually have a friend of mine that is getting counted as spam by akismet. I emailed akismet to see how to get him out of the spam filter.
beth
August 29th, 2006 10:47 pm
I couldn’t figure out what had changed! So much viagra at once! Glad it’s all sorted out - I really like Akismet, it’s usually very good.
New Akismet + Bad Behaviour = Almost Zero Spam :: Unintentionally Blank
February 15th, 2007 9:26 am
[…] One of the biggest benefits of upgrading to Wordpress 2.1 has been the new version of the Akismet plugin. All the other tweaks are all very nice, but the automatic deletion of spam on posts over a month old has left my spam queue almost empty. Considering I was receiving more that 100 spam comments a day previous to that (sadly double my unique daily visitors and nothing compared to some blogs), this has been a miracle. To date, Akismet has stopped 11,670 spam comments and I couldn’t be happier that I no longer have to look at 99% of them. […]
classicrock
June 22nd, 2008 6:01 am
I have over 25,000 comment spams on my blog. Now what? How do I delete them? I certainly cannot go page by page or I’ll be here for a month or two. Any ideas or tools ?
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