Tag: akismet

Thanks Akismet

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This message on the dashboard of your favourite blog this morning:

Akismet has protected your site from 100,717 spam comments already.

And already, despite a clear out:

There are 105 comments in your spam queue right now.

Akismet isn’t perfect. Either that or the spammers are getting more cunning. Here are two examples that slipped through this week, firstly from “free medication help”:

Hello, i believe that i saw you visited my web site thus i came to go back the want?

Which is obviously better English than what you want usual get on this blog the want.

And another one, unremarkable in content, but rather for the “name” of the sender, which was:

Regardless of your better efforts, everyone may ultimately get some good kind of a zit. Rather than taking this (this distributes the viruses and also oils inside the zit all around) try out putting toothpaste on it. The actual tooth paste works to absorb

The link attached took me to an online sex shop in Poland, which has some spectacular deals on at the moment. However, most of the spam that I get is far less useful. And (obviously), if I din’t have Akismet, I wouldn’t be able to do blogging here on  6000 miles… as I’d be too busy deleting spam comments.

So, thanks Akismet.

Akismet issues

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My Akismet anti-spam plugin has been misbehaving, seemingly since I upgraded to WordPress 2.6.1. This issue was indicated to me by (previously) regular commentor and all-round nice guy Del, who emailed me to say that he got a stream of computer-generated abuse each time he attempted to reply to a post.

At first, I just assumed it was because Akismet had worked out that Del was in Australia and therefore it was fine to abuse him. However, I thought I’d better not let it stop other nationalities from passing comment on my spoutings and so I contacted the guru. He came out with some somewhat vague reasoning for the problems which included the word “betweem”. He likes his big words. Anyway, I have deactivated Akismet and booted up YAWASP for a trial period. Let’s see what happens.

If you’ve had problems leaving comments, please email me. I like to hear what you have to say (mostly). Additionally, see if you can leave one now.

Incidentally, I notice that Ma.tt Mullenweg and the WordPress crew were in Cape Town this last week. I didn’t know they were coming or I would have said hello. And asked Ma.tt why his damn plugin was playing up!