Akismet change?
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Has there been an Akismet change in the last couple weeks? Previously, Akismet dispatched everything except for a few comments — now I am getting 30-50 a day in my spam queue. Also, pings and trackbacks are showing up regularly, which never happened before.
It is not a major problem, just something that adds a couple of minutes every day. And it used to work so well.
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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Didi your know that over 80% of the so-called comments submitted to the .wordPress.com domain every day are spam? What’s happening is the spammers are usually about 7 days behind when it comes to setting up new email addresses and sites and then hitting our sites. They are now coming on strong and it’s a pattern like a wave that I have observed for more than 5 1/2 years. Simply click the “spam” link and Akismet will learn the new information and links. Also note that if you had a WordPress.org self hosted install 50 spams a day would be nothing. Those with installs multiple batches of spam daily – hundreds of spam comments each and every day.
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timethief: Sorry, I didn’t make my point clear. For more than three years, Akismet has screened spam effectively — I had to delete a maximum of 15-20 spam messages a week. And never once missed a legitimate one.
In the last few weeks, that has changed. All spam now seems to be going into my queue, requiring deletion — not a major hassle, but a pain nonetheless. What I loved about Akismet was that the 80+ per cent of comments that were spam required absolutely no attention from me — there seems to have been a recent change that means that has ended.
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Hi Kevin,
I did understand what you are saying. I have seen spam waves like this in the past. As this is a public forum where every thread is indexed and anyone with internet access can read threads including spammers I’m thinking that you could contact Staff directly if you wish to.P.S. I’m a Canuck too. :)
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Sorry I misunderstood — I gather from your messages that this is a “new” kind of stream that Akismet has not yet caught up with. And that if I am patient, they will — until the next one comes along.
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Hi Kevin.
Did you click the Spam button on those comments, or just delete?
I can see a handful of spam reports from you in the last few days, but nothing that indicates a systematic problem.
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Tellyworth: The ones that I was referencing are trackbacks — for the most part already in the spam queue, so I simply deleted them. Some (I would guess 10-15 per cent) make it to the comments section and I send them to Spam before deleting them. The filter is working fine — it just seems to be different from a month or so ago when the spam did not make any queue.
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I’ve seen a big increase of the past couple weeks of spams not getting caught on my site, but one always has to remember that the spammers are always changing servers and tactics and such in an attempt to get around the spam filters. The best thing we can do is to continue to mark as spam, any that are missed so that the spam filters can learn and start to catch them.
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If it helps, what seems to have changed is that the spammer has found a way to use the trackback function (all the messages that don’t go directly to me Spam queue have been trackbacks.
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Trackbacks I suspect are much harder for spam filters to deal with since they have less data to go on (no username, no email address).
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