Akismet Angst

Akismet Angst... No!

A Warning to Akismet Users

Everyone knows that Akismet is Matt Mullenweg’s/Automattic’s WordPress anti-spam plugin, “a collaborative effort to make comment and trackback spam a non-issue and restore innocence to blogging, so you never have to worry about spam again” that runs “hundreds of tests on the comment and returns a thumbs up or thumbs down.” I’ll bet that most WordPress users who have comments turned on run it. Akismet normally works well–or so I had thought.

I just logged in and deleted a ton of spam caught by the Akismet WordPress plugin. Just as my mouse finger was releasing the “delete all” button, I noticed a real comment by a real person going away forever. I can’t describe how angry I felt. Here was someone who took the time to say something about something I had taken the time to say and it will never be seen by the readers.

I applaud Matt’s efforts to fight spam, but I realize now that I had built too much trust in Akismet. I wonder how many comments I’ve deleted by mistake. To Clickfire Blog readers, I apologize. To Akismet users, take this as a warning to occasionally take a peak into that vortex of filth spam bucket and check if there might be a good post.

Contributed by Emory Rowland in Blogging 03/24/07, Last revision
Emory Rowland

Emory Rowland is editor and keeper of the flame at Clickfire. He's a fanatical blogger, entrepreneur and builder of Internet things from way back. He's a founder of several blogs including Testimony Share, a site that encourages Christians from all over the world to write and share their testimonies. Emory's love for social media and success with organic search led him to start a SEO consulting venture. Apart from the Internet, he could be considered by many as pretty worthless. More...

5 comments

  1. Ulysses Ronquillo March 24, 2007

    Thanks for deleting my comment, buddy. Just kidding. It wasn’t mine. I know how you feel though. At least your spam count didn’t get reset like mine did. It was probably something I did and I still don’t know where the count is being kept.

    Reply
  2. Stephen Pitts March 25, 2007

    Emory,

    I started using Akismet to control the 75+ spam comments and trackbacks a while back, but it is not perfect. Matt has done an extremely great job, and I thank him for making it easier. Even my Gmail throws email into my spam folder that wasn’t spam.

    I think that the lesson learned is that no tool is perfect and there is no way to fully automate anything that is important.

    Reply
  3. azrin March 25, 2007

    I agree the Heuristics need a bit of fine tuning.Maybe an AI module to learn the patterns of a bot specific to the site itself.It’s a learning process. I just use triple layer to ensure that don’t happen that often , ie: NO HTTP-REFERER other than mine for Posting comment,changed the Post PAGE and akismet.

    Reply
  4. eastcoastlife May 3, 2007

    I dun like Akismet. I can’t believe I get banned by it in several of my friends’ blogs (after commenting for more than a year!) and not even allowed to comment when they accidentally deleted me as spam. Hope this gets through.

    Reply
  5. eastcoastlife May 3, 2007

    Yeah! it did!

    Sorry if you view this as spam. :)

    Reply

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