by Matt
Akismet Interface
We’ve got two improvements to the Akismet interface for you guys today.
The first is on the spam screen, there are now tabs that filter by what type of spam it is, namely a comment, pingback, or trackback. This allows you to scan more quickly through pingbacks and trackbacks, especially.
(Remember that just because it’s linking to you doesn’t mean it’s not spam. Beware of compliments too! Always visit the URL, see if it’s mostly advertising or looks auto-generated.)
Also to help keep the size of your Akismet queue down, we’ve started to discard spam on posts older than a month, which our statistics show are overwhelmingly spam. Of course if your spam queue doesn’t get that large and you’d like to turn this option off, just check the new option under Options > Discussion:
January 17th, 2008 at 5:29 pm
Ok, my spam is starting to climb… so perhaps this will be very useful indeed…
Thanks for your great work!
Ich blogge auf deutsch, I blog in German
with
WordPress…!
January 17th, 2008 at 5:39 pm
I think this feature is going to be useful. Separating the pingbacks/trackbacks is a good idea. thanks.
January 17th, 2008 at 5:40 pm
I just came back after a year long absence and couldn’t believe the amount of spam this tool caught, there was almost none when I left. These changes should help, thanks.
January 17th, 2008 at 5:57 pm
Akismet is already great. Now it will be more powerful.
Thanks for the creativity.
January 17th, 2008 at 6:01 pm
same here anitz… my span never been so low…
Tx for Akismet e tx for this new upgrade.
WordPress keepz ruling
January 17th, 2008 at 6:11 pm
Thank you! This will make despamming a lot easier
January 17th, 2008 at 6:29 pm
Great !
January 17th, 2008 at 6:33 pm
Good improvements! Most of my spam comments are on one or two posts from months ago, so maybe the guys who do that will finally get the message! It’s nice to see no spam waiting.
January 17th, 2008 at 6:38 pm
Yes, thank you. And thank GOD for Askimet.
January 17th, 2008 at 6:40 pm
me likey! Thanks!
January 17th, 2008 at 6:43 pm
Cool! Thanks so much for this filtering mechanism, because I *hate* having to scroll down through a lot of the junk you guys catch for me, just to make sure I haven’t missed something. This will be a *TREMENDOUS* help! WP rocks!
January 17th, 2008 at 6:49 pm
great one again Matt, thanks
January 17th, 2008 at 6:51 pm
Good work, Matt! I appreciate the ability to NOT discard spam on old posts in case a legitimate comment gets wrongly marked as Spam.
January 17th, 2008 at 6:54 pm
I don’t get much traffic. So I’m not so overwhelmed by spam as others may be. I’ve always been curious about the ones that were auto-deleted before I could see them. Thanks for the option to look at them!
You just keep getting better and better…
January 17th, 2008 at 6:57 pm
Thank you!
January 17th, 2008 at 6:57 pm
Thanks
January 17th, 2008 at 7:00 pm
Thanks for the “don’t discard spam on old posts” option. (does it mean “don’t discard all comments on old posts as spam?”
As a new WordPress.com user i’m still worried, that the many spam-comments, the spam-count says to have deleted and that i never had the chance to see, because they never showed up in the spam-queue are *really* spam… I wish every suspected spam-comment would show up in the queue, so i had the chance to decide myself…
Though my secret hope is, that the spam count rises - without showing spam in the queue to moderate - just for marketing purposes
January 17th, 2008 at 7:01 pm
If you get a legitimate comment on an old post, it should work just as before, but if you get a comment that Akismet thinks is spam and this option isn’t disabled it’ll discard it without saving it to the database for you to review. Since most false positives happen on recent posts, this allows you to focus on reviewing just the comments that are most likely to be real.
January 17th, 2008 at 7:05 pm
Not really a great addition. What would be more helpful is if you only show the first 5 lines of a post with the option to see the entire post if need be (throuh a nice ajaxy button). That way we won’t have to scroll through a mile long page just to check 10 comments.
January 17th, 2008 at 7:06 pm
Arsenalist, if we did that spammers would just put the spammy parts at the very end.
January 17th, 2008 at 7:27 pm
One thing everyone can do, is report SPAM pingbacks and trackbacks to Google. Page rank on Google is calculated by volume of links and visits and when they find spam sites, they de-list all links on the site. If your blog is targeted and your content is stolen and then linked back to you, your blog will be hurt by Google’s actions as well. Protect your blog and report all incoming SPAM links to your blog.
http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html
Rose
xo
January 17th, 2008 at 7:35 pm
What would we do without Akismet?
I was surprised to find more trackback than comment spam in my queue: 226 trackbacks, 136 comments. I don’t look in there often, hadn’t realized the trackback spam had become so popular.
Thanks for the fun tool!
January 17th, 2008 at 7:41 pm
Thank you !
January 17th, 2008 at 7:42 pm
Completely unrelated question… Matt: when is the Xmas hat coming off? It’s the middle of Jan!
January 17th, 2008 at 7:43 pm
You’re right about the santa hat, maybe later this week…
January 17th, 2008 at 7:56 pm
great !!
January 17th, 2008 at 7:56 pm
Thank you very much for doing this. I get a ton of spam in the filter, and quite often a good comment is held there.
January 17th, 2008 at 8:02 pm
sweet.
January 17th, 2008 at 8:04 pm
Is ‘Always visit the URL’ sensible advice? Don’t people set up pages with malware on them and then post comments and send pingbacks coming from these pages as a way to lure people to sites that will infect their computers? I would tend to say instead: if in doubt, don’t visit the URL.
January 17th, 2008 at 8:04 pm
good idea. any way to track down these sploggers? they are out of control and i don’t know what to do about them.
WC
January 17th, 2008 at 8:15 pm
Sweet.
January 17th, 2008 at 8:19 pm
great…
January 17th, 2008 at 8:22 pm
Sounds good. However, I just attempted to delete three spam messages and it is still indicating I have three on the tab after deleting all. Hmmm, seems like there is a bug somewhere.
January 17th, 2008 at 8:32 pm
good idea, guys.
January 17th, 2008 at 8:33 pm
Thanks.
January 17th, 2008 at 8:48 pm
Wouldn’t it be lovely to have the option to automatically delete comments that say “Paris Hilton,” “Jessica Alba,” or “Angelina Jolie” more than 20 times in one comment? Those are by and large the majority of what Askimet catches.
January 17th, 2008 at 9:14 pm
Yet another great improvement. Way to go, guys.
January 17th, 2008 at 9:31 pm
cool job!
January 17th, 2008 at 9:35 pm
Sweet! This is helpful!
January 17th, 2008 at 9:37 pm
Thanks for making an already great tool even better!
January 17th, 2008 at 9:45 pm
Holla!
Ok, and about those annoying spammer robots, anything to block them?
~Ag!~
January 17th, 2008 at 10:05 pm
nice update.
January 17th, 2008 at 10:05 pm
Perfect! We can get rid of these pings and trackbacks! wahooo!!! Couldn’t always via comments, hopefully this solves that issue. Thanks guys!
January 17th, 2008 at 10:11 pm
“Always visit the URL, see if it’s mostly advertising or looks auto-generated.)”
Dont know if I agree with that Guys. Couldnt you be leaving yourself open to all sorts of scripts etc to end up on your computer….
January 17th, 2008 at 10:15 pm
No comments - no Spam
January 17th, 2008 at 10:35 pm
Good development
January 17th, 2008 at 10:37 pm
Excellent suggestion about checking the url before letting a comment through. Since I partially moderate comments, letting one of these guys through the door could lead to them posting what they want on my blog.
Thanks.
January 17th, 2008 at 10:48 pm
Fantastic!
January 17th, 2008 at 11:36 pm
Perfect, keep improving.
Thank you !
January 18th, 2008 at 12:42 am
I tried it and I loved being able to sort through the pingbacks separately! I found a legit one amongst the strangies. Having avatars show up in the in the queue is great, too–thanks!
January 18th, 2008 at 1:16 am
Thanks as always!
January 18th, 2008 at 1:21 am
Cool! I just cleared two people out of our Spam box. ^^
January 18th, 2008 at 1:27 am
Thanks Matt,
Very useful.
Best regards from Spain
January 18th, 2008 at 1:33 am
Thank you Very Much for this! waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!!!
January 18th, 2008 at 1:34 am
just a question, but what are pingbacks and trackbacks?
January 18th, 2008 at 1:40 am
Great improvement, really I wanted this for many weeks ago while my spam was growing.
January 18th, 2008 at 2:23 am
Great works Matt,
Spam always attack me somehow
January 18th, 2008 at 2:48 am
2nd comment
Very good
January 18th, 2008 at 3:03 am
Excellent!
January 18th, 2008 at 3:25 am
Cool! Ty WP n’ Akismet!
January 18th, 2008 at 3:29 am
I hate spam!
January 18th, 2008 at 3:29 am
I <3 spam!
January 18th, 2008 at 3:35 am
Thanks. Good addition by the WP elves.
January 18th, 2008 at 3:43 am
Looks good. More good work from WP.com! You guys rock!
January 18th, 2008 at 4:10 am
Sweet Tweak!
January 18th, 2008 at 4:18 am
Akismet is useless. I desperately want to turn off this feature, but I can’t. Akismet blocks many comments that is actually not a spam.
January 18th, 2008 at 4:47 am
Thanks for your great work!
January 18th, 2008 at 4:57 am
Good.
January 18th, 2008 at 5:21 am
Wonderful! This anti spam feature is the very reason why I use wordpress. You guys are just giving me more reason to stick to wordpress. Keep up the good work!
January 18th, 2008 at 5:32 am
Great work indeed.
Thanks
January 18th, 2008 at 5:35 am
I dont experience much spamming happening on my blog as such, but this is definitely going to be a boon for the very popular blogs!
Thanking you on behalf of all o’ them!
January 18th, 2008 at 5:58 am
Anitz, this does nothing for the amount of spam you’ll receive. It only changes how you manage it slightly.
What I’d love to hear is why I’ve seen two recent cases where Akismet has flagged comments from people who regularly comment as spam (it didn’t anytime previously) Their comments held nothing I would consider suspicious.
January 18th, 2008 at 6:02 am
Very informative. Akismet is really a best soft for preventing spam.
January 18th, 2008 at 6:52 am
Matt, thanks for the new updates with great features.
January 18th, 2008 at 7:04 am
just a new user!
i keep rollin!
January 18th, 2008 at 7:36 am
Thank you for this. I’ve been getting more and more spam of trackback kind, so it will be good to sort through them more efficiently.
January 18th, 2008 at 7:55 am
great feature. Thanks.
January 18th, 2008 at 8:27 am
Hi Matt!
This is a great addition, particularly the discarding of comments on older posts. Your stats are definitely right cos I get this all the time on my old stuff. Thanks a million for the fantastic functionality, should simplify the lives of many
JL
January 18th, 2008 at 8:30 am
Well done, my friend. Thank you for that and for all you’ve done.
January 18th, 2008 at 8:34 am
Good stuff!
PS:
I wouldn’t advice to “always visit the URL” considering that most of the time they are links to adult content or worse…
January 18th, 2008 at 8:36 am
Hi
When you say that you are discarding spam on posts older than a month, do you mean spam or do you mean all comments? Just a question for clarity really.
Cheers
Aphra.
January 18th, 2008 at 8:38 am
I like the idea of breaking things up by type, but when I scan say Comments I’d expect the ‘Delete all’ button to delete just the Comments, and not the other sub-categories as well.
January 18th, 2008 at 8:40 am
Thank you.
Great work !
January 18th, 2008 at 8:48 am
Another brilliant improvement. Akismet really is the bees knees!
January 18th, 2008 at 9:29 am
very nice work. i am loving it!!!!
January 18th, 2008 at 9:41 am
thank u people
January 18th, 2008 at 10:02 am
Amazing…!
the never ending creativities… saluut!
thank, for fixed problem with akismet!!!
January 18th, 2008 at 11:00 am
I agree with Thomas Knoll. It would be nice to be able to check the comments in the spam-queue, just to make sure you don’t miss any “normal” comments.
January 18th, 2008 at 11:31 am
Awsome Thanks!
January 18th, 2008 at 12:07 pm
I’m getting about 1 spam comment a day (after being here 3 months), on my old site I got dozens, so any way to combat it = yay. Also, who wants to waste space on trash? ;p
January 18th, 2008 at 1:01 pm
Thanks a lot!
January 18th, 2008 at 1:47 pm
I’m liking it thus far….
January 18th, 2008 at 2:20 pm
Good
January 18th, 2008 at 2:59 pm
Thanks Matt
my spam too, is starting to climb, so this will be very useful indeed.
January 18th, 2008 at 3:29 pm
This is really useful. As it is, Akismet catches all my spam. Now it even organizes it neatly
January 18th, 2008 at 4:35 pm
WordPress is getting better and better. Everyday better than yesterday.
GREAT!
January 18th, 2008 at 6:53 pm
Why don’t we create something that is smarter than this current Akismet and block spams before they even enter the database? Imagine you have to moderate 1000 spams/day how much headache it becomes. You might even quit blogging.
What’s the difference between PingBack and TrackBack? Is it one actually linked to your post (TrackBack) and the other one only ping you without a link (PingBack)?
January 18th, 2008 at 9:36 pm
OMG
i love the new improvement
it makes things so much neater and more organized
great job
Adam G
January 18th, 2008 at 9:38 pm
Nice, but: the main problem with the spam interface is still there. It is still impossible to go through larger amounts of spam and delete them page wise. I would like to have a button to just mark/delete all the spam currently shown to me in the page I’m looking at. Doing this I could delete page after page but go through it before.
Most e-mail web interfaces do it exactly like that, btw.
January 18th, 2008 at 9:52 pm
Nice… the upgrade doesn’t break Akismet Auntie Spam.
January 18th, 2008 at 10:52 pm
I get lots of spam. I like Akismet a lot!
January 18th, 2008 at 11:03 pm
That it’s great, this is very useful tool, this gona make more easier separate spam from some coments are taged like spam, ¡Akismet you rock! Thanks a lot for this
January 19th, 2008 at 1:03 am
Its alot easier! Thanks!!
January 19th, 2008 at 1:32 am
Thank you for the option to turn off the discarding of spam on old posts. I’ve turned off comments and pingbacks to some old posts to cut down on spam, but I have a few that still get legitimate hits and comments. I do still get false positives, so I like to skim through them before deleting.
January 19th, 2008 at 1:53 am
uhh my spam counter thing is… like in the 80’s and I have only had 5 spam comments…
…
~Adam…
…
January 19th, 2008 at 2:10 am
cool new stuff as always.
- Lo
January 19th, 2008 at 4:33 am
Thank God for your spam controls! There is some truly horrid stuff out there, and you make sure it never hits my viewers eyes.
January 19th, 2008 at 5:24 am
Neat.
January 19th, 2008 at 8:22 am
cool
January 19th, 2008 at 9:45 am
thanks for the explaination on the “discard” option, Matt !!
January 19th, 2008 at 3:11 pm
Why write spam comments, if they are going to be discard, what a waste of
your time. Has anyone told you that you only got so much time in your life,
then its over, so don’t waste it.
January 19th, 2008 at 4:13 pm
I love what you did here, Matt, because it’s actually brought the spam down quite a bit…even in the trackback/ping area too. Thank you for all your hard work keeping us all happy and our blogs running smoothly!
January 19th, 2008 at 5:23 pm
nice
January 20th, 2008 at 12:08 am
Yeah, I agree with وحید .
The spamming filter alone has kept me here.
January 20th, 2008 at 1:43 am
Thanks for making our blogging easier to do!
January 20th, 2008 at 6:37 am
Daaaaaang…. Thought I was hardcore…. You know, there’s always Blogger.
January 20th, 2008 at 10:09 am
Hey bro…. Thx for sharing..
January 20th, 2008 at 11:33 am
The best spam filter !!! Thank you for your work guys.
January 20th, 2008 at 12:43 pm
I really think that this is blocking most of the normal comments of my blog. I used to have new comments everyday but not anymore…
January 20th, 2008 at 1:38 pm
Really good feature! I just came to know that ‘pingback’ can be spam too
January 20th, 2008 at 5:36 pm
Thanks Akismet,Good Bless you
January 20th, 2008 at 11:57 pm
I really appreciate akismet!
January 21st, 2008 at 11:33 am
Excellent move with the spam on old posts - thank you, Akismet!
January 21st, 2008 at 12:42 pm
Matt, Akismet works great. Can we get a feature to report blog spam to the relevant ISPs? Maybe then they can start to shut down the botnets and/or dialups used for the spam.
January 21st, 2008 at 3:06 pm
Yet to check its results !
But in general looks cool !
January 21st, 2008 at 4:17 pm
Blogging without worrying the spam = akismet. Many thanks, again and again.
January 21st, 2008 at 7:35 pm
Very good tool.
Many thanks!
January 22nd, 2008 at 12:53 am
Thanks! Very Helpful!
January 22nd, 2008 at 3:55 am
good toys, some people need more features..
thanks guys
January 22nd, 2008 at 10:01 pm
I’m new to Word Press, but I like the Idea. Word Press seems like a good community to make connections. Thanks Bob
January 22nd, 2008 at 10:31 pm
Is ‘Always visit the URL’ sensible advice? Don’t people set up pages with malware on them and then post comments and send pingbacks coming from these pages as a way to lure people to sites that will infect their computers? I would tend to say instead: if in doubt, don’t visit the URL.
January 24th, 2008 at 4:32 am
Sounds good
January 24th, 2008 at 9:05 am
Well i am using wordpress from a year. It’s all new features and enhanced functions is making it more reliable and user friendly. Moreover the CMS or interface is quite simpler and easy to use.
Thanks to WordPress Team.
January 25th, 2008 at 7:55 am
I think that without akismet blogs would be unmanageable! Thanks!
January 25th, 2008 at 3:51 pm
nice tool
I like it
January 26th, 2008 at 12:48 pm
I looked at the comments Akismet had said were spam and it turned out that both of them were proper comments from nice people!!!
January 29th, 2008 at 4:45 am
Good jobs guys! I’m really happy with Akismet.
January 30th, 2008 at 10:31 am
Thanks for the update. It just keeps getting better. I <3 WordPress!
February 14th, 2008 at 7:44 am
[...] I first confirmed the above with Akismet, they have added some additional features for those at WordPress.com. You now have the ability to turn off auto deletion of spam on older [...]
April 23rd, 2008 at 7:22 am
[...] Click here to read Matt’s January 2008 announcement regarding new Akismet features! [...]