Akismet is a fantastic plugin that anyone who uses WordPress will have, and you should ensure is active at all times.*
But it’s not quite ‘Fire & Forget’, you must check the spam queue regularly, and remove everything that isn’t spam - even if you don’t want it to appear on your blog. Simply de-spam it first, then delete it.
The reason is this: Akismet works by comparing new comments against a central database, and tagging things as spam based on IP and a few other factors. If you mark a comment as spam, your copy of Akismet will notify the central servers of this, and then all comments from that source will be marked as spam on every copy of WordPress in the world running an active copy of Akismet.
Why is this bad? An example. If I link to an older article of mine on Blog-Op, a pingback comment will be sent to that old post and usually get caught by Akismet. If I leave that comment in the spam folder (and remember, Akismet deletes everything with no hope of recovery after 30 days), then any comment I leave on any WordPress blog will get tagged as spam.
So although I don’t want my own pingbacks appearing here, I’m careful to de-spam them before deleting, thereby avoiding blacklisting myself. This is also true for genuine comments that have tripped the spam filter for one reason or another - if you don’t de-spam them, the commenter will get blacklisted. Akismet is ultimately self-correcting, but by the time you notice, the damage could be done.
*To activate your copy of Akismet, simply sign up for an account at WordPress.com and choose the ‘no blog, just account’ option to get your free API key.
6 users commented in " Akismet Is Great - But Be Careful "
Follow-up comment rss or Leave a TrackbackYou are right , these things do happen but it is quite frustating to keep track of my spams as i receive around 200-300 daily .
It’s a pain isn’t it? Thats why I like the Bad Behavior plugin as it drops the spams down to single figures, but unfortunately at the moment it also blocks people such as yourself because of your IP
I hope it gets fixed in the next release, because it’s a great plugin.
I tried other methods, but went back to Akismet only. It doesn’t take long to skim even a thousand spam comments. But I don’t have a real job, so I’m not one to speak with authority.
Akismet is built in to the free Wordpress blogs.
I find it great, I check it often but I have never had it wrongly picking a comment as spam or spam as a comment.
But I only get, maybe, 5 or 10 spam a day - nothing really.
cheers,
http://goldcoaster.wordpress.com
If they can make it a little smart it will work fine.It should have some logical power to separate into categories.That will ease out the burden of the blogger
That’s a good idea Ashish.
I wish I could filter the spam comments a bit, to make finding the genuine ones a bit easier.
Anything with 500 hyperlinks can be deleted straight away
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