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Akismet count/spam queue

  1. barry
    Staff

    Hopefully this will end the confusion regarding Akismet that has been expressed in number of threads:

    1) Akismet cannot be turned off on WordPress.com. That is not an option. With over 750,000 spams caught per day on WordPress.com blogs alone, trust me, you want it to stay on.

    2) Spam that sits in the spam queue for more than 15 days is automatically deleted. You cannot get it back. If you check your spam queue more often than every 15 days, you should not miss anything.

    3) *ALL* comments that Akismet thinks is spam should show up in the spam queue, irregardless of how old the post is that receives the comment. For self-hosted .org bloggers, there is an option to auto-delete spam on posts older than 30 days. That option is not available here at WordPress.com. It may be in the future, but it is not currently. There was a point about 6 months ago where the "auto-delete on old posts" functionality was enabled here at WordPress.com. It was only on for about a month before we turned it off again. We may re-enable it in the future.

    4) There appears be a bug that sometimes causes spam comments to either not show up in the spam queue, show up in the spam queue intermittently , or show up in the spam queue after some delay. We have received a few reports of this, but have not yet been able to replicate it. We will continue to work on this.

    Please do not contact Akismet support about the spam count/queue issue. We are already aware of it and it is something specific to WordPress.com.

  2. kimik0
    Member

    Woohoo! Thank you Barry! You win today's Helpful Staff Member award :)

  3. usuphilosophy
    Member

    My spam queue (at usuphilosophy.com) always shows up empty. Then I post a comment (it says only "test"), and suddenly it, along with 5 or 6 spam comments, show up in the queue, of varying ages.

    This is connected to another problem: my comments and those of an administrator are always labelled as spam. Frustrating!

  4. timethief
    Member

    @barry
    Thank you for the clarification. :)

  5. katm
    Member

    Thanks Barry.

    I had a similar experience as usuphilosophy.

    And tonight 124 spam comments showed up, including ones that have been playing hide and seek for the last few days.

  6. membracid
    Member

    Thank you SO much for acknowledging that things sometimes disappear. I have a nasty troll who's been accusing me of lying about that. Now I can send him to this thread. :)

    personally, though, I've found spam goes away a lot earlier than 15 days. Sometimes I have 10 spam, and I leave them for later. Then I come back...no spam!?

  7. barry
    Staff

    It's not supposed to go away earlier than 15 days.

  8. membracid
    Member

    it does, though.

    could this be related to the ongoing 404 problem when you delete spam?

  9. graaa
    Member

    Thanks for the clarification. Up until the last week my spam count kept going up, but I never saw anything in the queue. I had contacted you guys and askimet about it, but heard nothing from them (askimet).

  10. coloursofdawn
    Member

    Glad you are working on it. For some reason people have been commenting and telling me that their message hasn't posted. When I look at Akismet comments, there is nothing. I've passed on this link so they know they aren't alone.

  11. gnn1
    Member

    my spam only SHOWS UP intermittently. more accurately, I've been able to access it twice in the last 11 days (I've only HAD a blog for 11 days!!).

  12. sunburntkamel
    Member

    couldn't you make it so that akismet could be disabled on private blogs? (in my experience, private blogs receive no spam, and akismet's false positive ratio is abhorrent)

  13. markljackson
    Member

    It's not just spam comments that are delayed. I have had comments not spammed that did not show up for a couple of days. Seems this is within the last couple of months.

  14. pwnedd
    Member

    I'm having the same issue, but worse still is that some of my OWN comments are also marked as spam and then disappear :\

  15. callybooker
    Member

    I've never been able to see any spam comments in any spam queue but the number 'caught' has suddenly shot up in the last couple of days - I'm a bit worried they might be genuine comments though noone has emailed me to grumble... Confident that you guys can fix it though!

  16. siobhancurious
    Member

    I had an incident today where I marked a comment as "approved," but it was identified as spam anyway, and now it seems to have disappeared. Why would this have happened? Where would I go to find it?

  17. gramuso
    Member

    Funny you cannot replicate: I cannot get away from it -- the Akismet counter goes up and up, but nothing ever appears anymore... yesterday I was at 21, today 24, but not a message.
    I use Firefox, tried to "clean-up" by removing cookies... Also tries IE for a change, but no difference.
    Thanks for looking into it.

  18. silverglade00
    Member

    Experiencing problems similar to above for some time now on http://www.littlerockeating.com. Spam count in blog stats rising constantly, but queue shows empty. All admin (only one account) comments marked as spam. I used my laptop at my work location to sign up for the account (don't tell my boss). It seems that it only shows up on the same computer at the same location. Other locations/computers do not show it at all. I have not performed any formal testing, only noticing a trend on that. A few weeks ago, I was able to access the queue to clean it up only on weekends. Now I have been unable to access it at all for two weeks. Thanks for looking into it and I hope our feedback helps track it down.

  19. corefoundations
    Member

    This is happening to me as well (since I started my blog). I have a list saying x# of spam caught by Akismet, but when I go to see, it says 0 in queue and it's my lucky day. I really don't feel so "lucky". If this can't be fixed soon, please allow individuals the opportunity to get rid of it. I have no issues moderating comments on my own blog; and I like having the control to do so. I don't appreciate being "helpless".

  20. jpoyer
    Member

    All of these things are happening to me as well, ok, with the exception of having 124 spam messages show up on one day. (I still have a baby blog, not that kind of traffic happening for me yet. Though I did have fairly decent traffic on my I Crashed WordPress post -- which is good because I am still laughing hard at my own joke.)

    I had four caught prior to that, but only ever saw three to approve (one of them my own post, and two from a client). Just wanted to throw my hat in the ring, my well-wishes to the WP techies, and the hope this will be fixed soon. (I need every viewer I can get, don't want to lose any to comments not showing up.)

    Good luck WP! (If you need any foot creme, I think I have some laying around.)

  21. onepress
    Member

    I read something here as well. masterssecret.com/akismet-spam.html

  22. torcie
    Member

    Hi,

    I am also seeing the spamcount rise and not seeing any messages in the spam queue. I know a couple of the comments are legitimate and the commenters are a tad frustrated.

  23. stusshed
    Member

    Found this thread, and was a tad disappointed - I was trying to find a way to turn Akismet off - the stupid bloody thing marked one of my comments ON MY OWN BLOG as spam. There were no links or anything that should have triggered it.

    Needless to say, it should be able to automatically allow the blog's administrator to post without marking it as spam - that is pathetic.

    The fact that I am seeing here that legitimate comments are being marked and not being seen really bothers me - I am encouraging my visitors to comment, and if they are going to the trouble of commenting, and it is not turning up, and I am not having a chance to see their post to even moderate it, that bothers me greatly - it makes me look like I am providing a poor service to my 'guests' even though it is out of my control. I would rather moderate every comment, and not miss legitimate ones, than have legitimate comments lost in the ether.

  24. trent
    Member

    I understand how you feel stusshed, but I have run a blog without Akismet. That is a nightmare without even being popular......impossible if you are. This is also a shared system so Akismet currently is run on everything (including forum) and not to be turned off on a 'blog by blog' basis yet (if staff ever have it). If you have your own host and a copy of wordpress instead of being hosted here, you can have what you want, just not with this hosting.

    Trent

  25. matt
    Staff

    stusshed, when you report mistakes back to Akismet it DOES learn. Has it caught any comments of yours since that one you reported?

  26. stusshed
    Member

    Don't comment often - only in response to others, so next time someone comments and I get to reply I'll see. And if it does mark it, I will 'educate' it further.

    Irrespective, it shouldn't mark the blog's administrator's comments as spam - that doesn't make sense.

    Thanks for the response though - appreciated.

  27. kimik0
    Member

    So it's been two weeks since you acknowledged the Akismet problem. How are you doing on getting it fixed? Anything we can help with?

  28. radmus
    Member

    hi

    i check my spam daily and can NEVER get to the spam comments. This has been happening since I joined wordpress. I have never been able to open a single comment since I started. ANY sign of this being fixed this side of Christmas or should I just move propviders?

  29. trent
    Member

    Ramdus, do you have a blog hosted with wordpress.com? The issues Barry is speaking about are related only to WordPress.com hosted blogs as he states in the original post:

    We are already aware of it and it is something specific to WordPress.com.

    Trent

  30. briosafreak
    Member

    The comments don't show up on the queue, same problem here.

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