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1. zooey
   Member
   Dec 2, 2012, 7:33 PM

   I've been hoping that this problem would solve itself but it doesn't seem so yet -- and nobody else seems to be asking about it, but I assume I can't be the only one experiencing it (?).

   The spam comments -- which are all obvious spam -- correctly end up in the spam 'folder' as suspected spam should do, but what surprises me is the extreme increase in spam I get in this folder. From emptying perhaps 10 spam comments a day, the number have risen to about perhaps 3-400 a day over the last two days. This problem appeared very suddenly. I woke up to 180 spam comments yesterday. Roughly the same number today. And they keep pouring in. Sometimes 5 new have appeared while spam is being emptied...

   As I understand it, much of this obvious spam is filtered out and the user, the blogger, never sees it. (I may be wrong.) It never goes into the blogger's visible spam folder as suspected spam.

   I wonder if something is up with the spam filters and, if so, if this problem is being dealt with? (In which case I shall relax!)

   The issue is, of course, that sometimes a genuine comment ends up in suspected spam, and it's awfully difficult to notice it among hundreds of real spam comments.

   The blog I need help with is zooey.wordpress.com.

2. ardpete
   Member
   Dec 2, 2012, 8:27 PM

   All spam, obvious or otherwise goes to the spam folder. If it's in the spam folder then the filters working correctly. As long as they're not appearing on your actual blog you have nothing to worry about.

3. ardpete
   Member
   Dec 2, 2012, 8:28 PM

   And if an actual comment ends up in the spam filter, it's usually because someone else has reported them as being a spammer (as I understand it anyway).

4. zooey
   Member
   Dec 2, 2012, 8:34 PM

   I don't believe that, frankly. On my dashboard it says that Akismet protected me from a huge number of spam comments. No, they have not all been in my spam folder, at least not the visible spam folder, the one I see and empty.

   And I see no reason for a 40 times or more increase in the number of spam comments in the spam folder from one day to another.

   Also -- I'm not sure why you assume I have nothing to worry about. I patently do -- as I pointed out. The fact that occasionally non-spam ends up in the suspected spam folder is reason enough.

5. ardpete
   Member
   Dec 2, 2012, 8:51 PM

   You do realize that Akismet counts all spam it's protected you from during the life of your blog not just the spam you currently have in your folder? Everything that's spam is never hidden from the user in case something has been marked incorrectly. There is no invisible spam folder whether you believe it or not.

   Akismet isn't always perfect, if you're absolutely sure something ended up in there isn't spam then simply unmark it as so and it'll not happen again but 99.9% of the time something that has been marked as spam is spam.

   There is no reason why you'd get more spam one day than you would any other but it happens, it happens to me from time to time, as long as my blog isn't covered in spam then I don't care. I assumed you have nothing to worry about because you don't.

6. zooey
   Member
   Dec 2, 2012, 9:05 PM

   'You do realize that Akismet counts all spam it's protected you from during the life of your blog not just the spam you currently have in your folder?'

   Well, of course I do. 10 spam comments a day gets us nowhere near the number Akismet claims to have stopped. That's why I'm saying what I'm saying.

   It has never happened before. Not 400 a day. Not even near. Sure, it's up and down. Sure, there has been an increase. But this was absurd, and I don't think it's strange to wonder if something is wrong with the spam filter.

   And, again, it's not up to you what I have to worry about. I do worry, because it's an enormous task to go through 400 spam comments a day.

7. raincoaster
   Member
   Dec 2, 2012, 9:55 PM

   Are you saying that you have found actual comments in the spam folder have increased, or just spam? Because a sudden huge increase in spam is perfectly normal: it simply means that you've been indexed by a popular search engine. I recall reading that out of every thousand comments, over 900 are spam.

8. zooey
   Member
   Dec 2, 2012, 10:05 PM

   No, it's only the occasional comment that isn't spam but is thought to be so by the system. It's rare, but it happens. I don't see any increase there. The extreme increase that happened overnight was only spam, as far as I could tell. (It's almost impossible to go through so many comments.)

   I had not considered that a sudden huge increase might be normal for that reason you mention, and I wouldn't have expected it as my blog must have been indexed by the major search engines for a couple of years at least. But there might be some other search engine factor at play.

9. raincoaster
   Member
   Dec 2, 2012, 10:32 PM

   Yes, like Chinese search engines that previously only indexed Chinese sites. Sounds like everything is operating normally.

10. zooey
    Member
    Dec 3, 2012, 12:11 AM

    That might be the culprit, yes.

    After mulling over this for a while, I observed that, luckily, the spam wasn't evenly distributed over the whole blog. So, at least temporarily, I've disabled comments where it seemed strategically necessary. It might seem obvious, but perhaps the idea helps someone else with the same problem. Not an ideal solution, but so far seems to dry up the flood a bit.

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