Spam Filter Working Overtime

Posted by Pixelhead

Askimet is a great spam filter, but at times it does too good of a job. I have had a number of people email me telling me that their comments have gone into the spam file. Usually, I try to go through the spam folder to see if any good comments have been caught. However, this week I am on vacation, and the amount of time I am online is drastically reduced.

Tuesday night I checked the spam folder and well over spam 3000 comments had been caught by the filter. I checked about 10 pages, and there was only one comment that could be considered to be a good comment. The rest of the comments were deleted.

Yesterday, I did check several times throughout the day, and there were no good comments caught by the spam filter. This morning, after our breakfast trip to Palm Beach, I checked the Spam folder, and well over 1500 spam comments have been caught. Sorry to say, but I am not going to be going through all those comments on my vacation.

Spam Filter Caught Your Comments?

If you have made a comment, and it was not published, but feel it was a good comment, I am sorry, and hope you will comment again.

Don’t leave comments with excessive links, as anything over two links is filtered.
Make sure your comment relates to the post.

How do you handle spam comments? Do you have commenting guidelines?

Written by Pixelhead on April 3rd, 2008 with 27 comments.
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27 comments

Read the comments left by other users below, or:

Andrew Flusche
#1. April 4th, 2008, at 1:48 PM.

Man, that’s a bunch of spam in your filter! That’s one of the horribly unfortunate things about opening websites up for commenting: spammers.

I wonder if one of those math questions (”What’s 2 + 4?”) would help reduce the spam you get. Just a thought.

Adam_Y
#2. April 4th, 2008, at 5:39 PM.

I’ve recently had trouble with one commenter repeatedly trying to spam my site with some pretty horrible stuff and I’ve had to resort to banning the IP address, their email and even contacting their service provider (the stuff they are posting is really that bad).

But other than that I’ve never really had too much of a problem. Askimet keeps a pretty good watch and the community using my site are rather good at dealing with the rest.

It’s just a shame that spam exists at all… I mean 90% was a figure for the percentage of email that is spam and I fear that we’re going that way with comments, trackbacks and the like.

Melo
#3. April 5th, 2008, at 1:11 AM.

I have like 3 plugins installed in my WP blog to handle spam but no captchas. I don’t like them personally.

Pixelhead
#4. April 5th, 2008, at 2:02 AM.

I used a Captcha for a while when I had some spam that was getting through and causing havoc. But the captcha was a bit of a pain, so I disabled it after about a week. That seemed to get me off of the spammers list…no problems since.

Naomi Dunford
#5. April 5th, 2008, at 2:58 AM.

I had that happen a few days ago. Out of the blue, three people emailed me in one day, all telling me my blog is eating their comments. I’m running Akismet, but I just read a post somewhere about something called Defensio, I think. Anyone heard about that?

Ami
#6. April 5th, 2008, at 9:48 PM.

I am sooo jealous.

3000 spam comments means 3000 visitors. You have got to figure out a way to monetize that portion of your traffic

With regards to spam, have you tried defensio. It is said to be better than askimet and does not lose as many useful comments

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#7. April 6th, 2008, at 8:21 AM.

wow, that sure is a lot of spam! great you have it filtered out then…

Michael
#8. April 6th, 2008, at 8:23 AM.

Sometimes Askimet tends to be doing overly great job by filtering out comments that are not spam

Sebastien
#9. April 7th, 2008, at 9:36 AM.

@#1 - A captcha code always help but now spammers have some softwares able to recognize them!
http://www.worldfranchising.com/

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#10. April 7th, 2008, at 11:40 AM.

This spam filter is quite useful, but sometimes can be annoying. I have had situations on a site of mine about acoustic tabs (and music in general) where it deleted real comments. I had friends telling me that they sent comments on my blog and they didn’t see them appearing. I found them in the spam filter. Well..

Daniel
#11. April 7th, 2008, at 12:09 PM.

tell u what. most of the time spammers themselves donnot know about the things which they r rying to promote. so its petty much a desperate bunch of guys trin to earn quick bucks.

Steve Teal
#12. April 7th, 2008, at 3:40 PM.

Oh my goodness! 10 pages!?! You have some great patience. If it were me I would have just hit the delete all button. I’ve used Akismet but with ReCaptcha so anything that gets caught in the filter to me is worth deleting. How long has it been since you cleared out your Akismet that you received 3000 comments?

Steve
http://www.tealmontgomery.com

Mizzy worts
#13. April 7th, 2008, at 5:01 PM.

I think a lot of email clients are starting to have better filters, i remember a few years back, it use to be very hard to find emails that were actually not garbage in ones inbox.
http://www.illinoisBienesRaices.com

Pixelhead
#14. April 7th, 2008, at 6:34 PM.

Steve, I usually clear out my spam folder once or twice a day. When I was on vacation, I went several days without checking it.

Andk
#15. April 7th, 2008, at 11:18 PM.

A good way to avoid spammers is to turn off allow follow… It’s what a lot of them look for when they’re spamming since it helps their search engine positioning.

Vending Guy
#16. April 8th, 2008, at 7:47 PM.

I noticed you use a follow tag. I know there is spam software that looks for that; this could be part of the problem. If you don;t want to use the nofollow can’t you just disable that instead?

Just a thought.

Chuck

Pixelhead
#17. April 8th, 2008, at 8:29 PM.

Andk, for now I will continue to use a follow tag. Dealing with spam will have to continue. I am sure that others such as TechCrunch get a ton of spam comments compared to me.

James
#18. April 8th, 2008, at 8:47 PM.

Askimet works well… a little too well.. I always have to go into their spam box and uncheck many normal comments.

spostareduro
#19. April 9th, 2008, at 3:46 AM.

That’s a hell of a lot of spam caught in your filter. Bummer..
Heck, even Bill S gets caught in my filter because some scraping crapazoid has managed to skim his site repeatedly and uses his info to flog others. So, it happens to the best of us. Something to be aware of for sure. Double checking our spam box to make sure we are deleting valuable commenters may take more effort but it is something we must do. Booo!

spostareduro
#20. April 9th, 2008, at 3:48 AM.

oops! making sure “NOT to delete valuable commenters” is what I meant to say (eek!)

Jason Rogers
#21. April 9th, 2008, at 6:31 PM.

I dont get very many comments on my blog, but i noticed that sometimes things arent spam. Still great software tho.

Composting Guy
#22. April 9th, 2008, at 7:14 PM.

You’re right about Askismet doing too good of a job. I just signed up for Wordpress and have only one post with no comments, and soon had over 50 spam comments caught by the program in one day. I don’t think I’m even indexed yet!

Eva White
#23. April 10th, 2008, at 8:27 AM.

I have never used Akismet but it seems quite unreliable as per your description on the same.

Rick
#24. April 11th, 2008, at 3:37 PM.

Askismet is a wonderful tool, but you still gotta check what it is doing. With the updated and better Wordpress versions I think things will get better even with spam.

IBS Pro!
#25. April 12th, 2008, at 10:07 AM.

akismet is doing fine with me…

Matt
#26. April 17th, 2008, at 3:43 PM.

Akismet works well, It’s a needed tool in all bloggers tool chest.

WordPress, Made Easy
#27. July 11th, 2008, at 9:15 PM.

you are a very gracious blogger to filter through 3000 spam messages to find only 1 legit comment. I’m glad you value your readers enough to spend the time to do that. Not many bloggers out there would take the time to do that.

good job!

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