Akismet Angst
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.
March 24th, 2007 at 3:05 pm
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.
March 25th, 2007 at 11:41 am
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.
March 25th, 2007 at 5:18 pm
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.
May 3rd, 2007 at 12:00 am
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.
May 3rd, 2007 at 12:01 am
Yeah! it did!
Sorry if you view this as spam. :)