Scobleizer - Latest Comments in Is Akismet down?

Re: Is Akismet down?

Gavin Ingham — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 05:18:54 -0000

Firstly, great blog… so much of interest and use on it.

And secondly, on to Askimet!! Until about 3 months or so ago Askimet span worked fine for me stopping 90%+ of spam and with what seemed high accuracy. Then over night everything changed. Askimet stopped catching spam and stopped being able to see what was and what was not spam.

I am sure that I do not get that much spam compared to some but comments on other sites such as read your spam comments are not really practical (I get several hundred a day and rising) and totally negate the point of having it in the first place.

Over the last day or two the stats were as follows…

Total comments & spam 359.
Awaiting moderation 174 – Spam 170, legitimate 4.
Askimet spam 185 – Spam 168, legitimate 7.

This would imply that Askimet is guessing and not that well at that. I have emailed Askimet to ask for advice but would be interested if anyone else has experienced a rapid change in fortunes with Askimet, what caused it and what the solution is…

Re: Is Akismet down?

Matt Foxtrot — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 17:58:37 -0000

I would've thought that if Askimet was down it would automatically hold it in the queue. At least, I hope it would.

Re: Is Akismet down?

Cristian Vat — Sun, 27 Aug 2006 12:25:02 -0000

Same problem here too. It must be down because I've had like 50 spam comments since 7 hours ago and all of them got through the filter. Good thing there still is the moderation queue.

Re: Is Akismet down?

Karl Long — Sun, 27 Aug 2006 12:10:05 -0000

You might want to try out the hashcash plugin, I had deactivated it a while ago because it interfered with co-comment, but it works great on stopping spambots dead in their tracks.
http://elliottback.com/wp/a...

Re: Is Akismet down?

Robert Scoble — Sun, 27 Aug 2006 12:01:44 -0000

Idyllopus: hmmm, I've had to manually delete more than 200 spams this morning so far. Yikes.

Re: Is Akismet down?

Idyllopus — Sun, 27 Aug 2006 11:57:42 -0000

I love Akismet as well. It's been great.

Akismet is still catching some for me but I've had many get through this morning. I wondered as well if it had to do with the "fine tuning" noted on the Akismet blog.

Re: Is Akismet down?

Karl Long — Sun, 27 Aug 2006 10:37:20 -0000

Yeah, it's been crazy on my blog as well, I'm actually somewhat relieved that it's not just me :-) Most of them are getting held for moderation, but I get an email alert for that so I got a tonne of email as well this morning. Boy, i hope they get this figured out soon.

Karl

Re: Is Akismet down?

Robert Scoble — Sun, 27 Aug 2006 10:27:12 -0000

Yeah, it's still down for me. Many spams overnight. Whew.

Re: Is Akismet down?

tmarkiewicz — Sun, 27 Aug 2006 09:39:56 -0000

It's good to hear that I'm not the only one having this spam issue this morning. The only thing I've been able to find out so far is what Neville mentioned above - Akismet had an upgrade last night. It's hard to complain though as Akismet has been almost perfect for me to date. Hopefully this is just a temporary glitch, but it would be nice to hear from them what may have happened.

Re: Is Akismet down?

Jeremie Berrebi (Zlio.com) — Sun, 27 Aug 2006 07:46:49 -0000

>>Akismet seems to be back stopping spam again

No Tom...The Akismet plugin is not working (500 spams on my blog since this morning :-()

Something is bizarre. On their website, it seems that they have filtered a lot of spam today ! (645,791...)

2 solutions

1. Their counter is a fake
2. The problem is appearing only on Wordpress Blogs.

Re: Is Akismet down?

Tom Raftery — Sun, 27 Aug 2006 06:19:08 -0000

Akismet seems to be back stopping spam again

Re: Is Akismet down?

Tom Raftery — Sun, 27 Aug 2006 04:37:09 -0000

I stopped it on my blog now.

I noticed most of the spam comments contained a term (bu***ke - not using the full term in case I fall foul of filters!).

If you add that term to WordPress -> Options -> Discussion -> Comment Blacklist and click update all comments containing that term are nuked. No notification, nothing, gone.

Use with care!!!

Re: Is Akismet down?

The Zero Boss — Sun, 27 Aug 2006 04:33:04 -0000

Noticing the same thing here.

I guess the phrase is true: ya don't know what ya got until it's gone. Hopefully I'll wake up in the morning to a functioning spam filter, and not 100 moderation emails.

Re: Is Akismet down?

Tom Raftery — Sun, 27 Aug 2006 04:32:56 -0000

Robert - same here on my WordPress powered blog. I usually get none but overnight over 30 spams got through. That's a new record for me. I have very tight controls in place.

This just goes to show how effective Akismet usually is. It has, so far, stopped 22,981 spams for me but the most recent spam stopped was 11:22pm GMT - just over 10 hours ago.

And the spam is still coming through.

Re: Is Akismet down?

Neville Hobson — Sun, 27 Aug 2006 04:28:32 -0000

Robert, I think it might be to do with a system upgrade to Akismet -

http://akismet.com/blog/200...

I've also had a blitz of spam comments waiting in the moderation queue today, the type of stuff that normally never ever makes it there but instead gets trapped by Akismet.

Hopefully just a temporary thing.

Re: Is Akismet down?

Todd Blanchard — Sun, 27 Aug 2006 04:16:20 -0000

Spam, shmam. I left a misconfigured proxy server open for a week and, while I've got it locked down denying everything except what its supposed to pass, the click fraudsters are sending it thousands of requests to proxy clicks through to various ad networks. I've added dynamic firewall measures to permanently lock out any ip that produces 5 404's in 10 minutes, but its barely making a dent.

Its enough to make a person consider abandoning the internet.

Re: Is Akismet down?

Eddie Codel — Sun, 27 Aug 2006 03:47:32 -0000

I too got a ton of spam in the past few hours, though it was almost all trackback spam.

Re: Is Akismet down?

Deepak — Sun, 27 Aug 2006 03:34:33 -0000

Well hopefully it is a temporary glitch, since Akismet is the best blogging tool that no one talks about (cause it works so well)

Re: Is Akismet down?

Silfrenwulf — Sun, 27 Aug 2006 03:29:06 -0000

Same for me, Akismet normally blocks spam but today it got through.

Re: Is Akismet down?

eio — Sun, 27 Aug 2006 03:10:05 -0000

hey, i was wondering the same thing as mr.scoble. i guess i'm getting better at blogging ;)

Re: Is Akismet down?

Wouter — Sun, 27 Aug 2006 03:05:37 -0000

Have the same problem. http://rest.askimet.com/ (the server Askimet checks for spam content) doesn't seem to respond to requests, I guess it has to do with that.

Re: Is Akismet down?

Guido — Sun, 27 Aug 2006 02:57:09 -0000

same problem here, akismet is not dettecting spam, I think the akismet server with the spam database is down or something.

Re: Is Akismet down?

james — Sun, 27 Aug 2006 02:54:31 -0000

Please collect a large markdown on your medicine
faithful classes, Premier quality.
collosal mixed bax, including strenuous to find drugs
No formula needed.
Secret with No waiting space or date vital
Obtain in mass and Save! whereas further

(joke-pasted my latest spam)

Re: Is Akismet down?

Brian Benzinger — Sun, 27 Aug 2006 02:53:09 -0000

Same problem here. I've received close to 200 spam comments already, starting a couple hours ago, and it's driving me crazy. I just keep my comments window open and click refresh every minute. Good to hear I'm not the only one!

For now, I have set it so all comments are sent to moderation in the Discussion Options. It helps because at least offensive spam comments aren't making way to my readers.

Re: Is Akismet down?

Robert Scoble — Sun, 27 Aug 2006 02:47:36 -0000

Deepak: I'm not sure. I wonder if this is because the spammers got smart and are changing their methods? Either way, I just went through and cleaned up the mess. I've learned that this usually helps everyone out in the system (Akismet is a community, actually, and we help each other out by properly checking both our comments and our spam pages to make sure it's doing its job correctly).

It's WAY better than the blocking systems on other blog services, though. So, I'm VERY happy. It's just very unusual when it doesn't work well, so it's worth talking about here.