Can you turn off the Spam Filter?
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Is there a way to turn off the Spam filter? Because half of the comments it stops are genuine comments.
Thanks
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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No there is not, and the likelihood of it being that inaccurate is highly unlikely. Spammers are getting very good at making comments look legitimate. Can you give us a link to one of those comments that you think was not spam?
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As an example, the following comments on your site are absolutely almost certainly spam.
Gewinne: http://danielakawmd.wordpress.com/2010/05/15/changes-to-our-blog/#comment-119
Click on this comment username and you get a list of sites that are all about car loans
ShomoSparaFar: http://danielakawmd.wordpress.com/2010/05/15/changes-to-our-blog/#comment-139
And this one is highly suspect. They are searching the internet for things like “weight loss and such and then they go to those sites and leave comments or do faux “trackbacks” to an article that supposedly links to yours, but you go to that site and never find a link to your site. Much of this is done by automation. All they are trying to do is get a link to their weigh loss CD onto your site, and they succeeded.
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How to review comments (spam or otherwise) to determine if they are legitimate:
1. Any comment rife with links is 99.99999999% assuredly spam.
2. If you write a post about gardening and get a comment with a username of “lose weight now” it is 99.99999999% assuredly spam.
3. Visit the site linked to the username (make sure your virus protection is up to date because far too many of the sites will have malware on them. If it is spammy and covered with ads for viagra or other such spammy things, it isn’t a legitimate comment.
4. Check out links on trackbacks/pingbacks as well. Look at the username, look at the site it is linked to. It won’t take you more than a few minutes before you are able to spot.
5. Comments such as “exceptional article. Man i love the design of your site. Amazing site that i came across with stunning design. which theme are you using.” are absolutely spam. Don’t believe me? Check the site linked to the username. All they wanted to do is get a link to their site selling junk onto your site. -
Here is the bottom line with the akismet spam filter.
It is over 99% accurate meaning it misses or mis-identifies spam on average only 1 out of 100 times. If it says the comment is spam, you can pretty much take that to the bank as true.
You have approved a lot of spam comments. Sorry.
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Taking my blog as an example,
number of comments caught by Akismet so far: around 3900;
number of comments incorrectly caught: four. -
Hi thesacredpath, I think this may be spam then? On one of my blogposts?
Would you mind verifying?http://cravingappl3pie.wordpress.com/2010/11/06/white-chocolate-sorbet/#comment-4
Thanks.
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You’re welcome. It’s experience that’ll teach you, but even that’s not perfect; last week I deleted a real comment just because it was the generic “Great post!” and it turned out to be an actual compliment from a real blogger. Oops.
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This post contains some tips for spotting spam comments, pingbacks and trackbacks http://onecoolsitebloggingtips.com/2010/05/06/trackback-and-pinback-spam-what-to-do/
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It also seems that there’s been a big increase in the amount of human generated spam over the last week. I’ve been “marking as spam” at least 3 comments a day on my primary blog alone.
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I had a legitimate comment without links today that simply would not post. If I didn’t know the person who e-mailed it to me (so I could manually paste it into his other, shorter comment) then I wouldn’t have even known about it.
Go to travelandmobility.wordpress.com and look at the comment by “Danny”. Tell me why that was filtered out please? I would also like to turn off this spam filter.
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First, you cannot turn off the spam filter,
Akismet is always changing and adapting to keep up with spammers who are continually changing their tactics and switching from email address to email address and ISP to ISP. Sometimes innocents get caught when those changes are made to keep up with the spammers. If an innocent gets caught in the spam filter, you want to un-spam them. When you do that Akismet will learn and within a day or two they won’t get caught anymore.
I’ve also known of instances where someone gets marked as spam on a blog by mistake which means they then get caught by the spam filter.
What you can do is go to http://akismet.com/ and use the contact form there and request that they remove that person from the spam filters.
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Why can’t I moderate my own posts? Why am I forced to use an automated system?
This is a bad idea.
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You can approve spam crap into your blog if you want – Akismet is a feature – having ran blogs with and without it, Akismet saves a lot of work – my main site gets up to 300 spam comments a day – that is a lot of “moderating”
Also having Akismet on all the time helps keep WordPress.COM free of junk Spam which will mess up the entire sites SEO with the search engines if there is a lot of Spam on the site.
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My spam record so far is 450 per day. It has settled down quite a bit lately though and I’m down to right around 125 per day. Each morning when I boot up my computer, there is anywhere from 30 to 60 waiting for me to go through. It only catches a legitimate comment about 1 or 2 times in a 6 month period.
As to why Danny was caught, perhaps his IP address is within a block of known spammers. Perhaps someone else actually spammed some of his comments for whatever reason.
What you need to do is to “un-spam” his comments and then he will not get caught in the future. When in the spam folder, hover your mouse over the line with his comment, or anyone else that happens to get caught and click the “not spam” link. If you don’t do that then they will continue to get caught.
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I even tried posting it myself. So, it wasn’t an IP address. It had to be content. What part of that was interpreted as spam?
I just went through my Spam folder (didn’t know it was there.) Found that about 30% of the messages were NOT spam but were comments that I didn’t even know about. This is an unacceptable rate of false positives.
I hate spam as much as anyone, but not to the point that I want to lose such a high # of legitimates. Esp. when advertised (above) that “you can take it to the bank that it’s spam” (paraphrased).
Users SHOULD be given the option to use this technology, knowing full well that opting-out could cause additional unwanted spam.
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BTW: Clicking “not spam” doesn’t post the comment to the blog. The comment just disappears.
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His IP address would be different from yours unless he is in the same city and on the same ISP as you are, but there are many other factors. When you make a comment, WordPress can “see” the cookie it placed on your computer, so it knows you are OK and even if you are logged out when you put in his comment, it knows you are the blog owner.
One of the blogs I’m associated with here has nearly 10,000 comments in a little over a year and a half, and Akismet accuracy is 100.00%. That means that the % caught incorrectly is under 0.005%.
Even on my poorly neglected blog here accuracy is 97%, and I use that blog to “de-spam” people who report getting caught here in the forums, so that number will always be lower than what it actually is.
If you don’t want a spam filter, you can self-host a blog and then don’t activate Akismet or any other spam filter and you can do it all manually.
Give Akismet a chance, and have Danny make another comment and then de-spam him. I think what you will find after a couple months is that Akismet is very accurate and very few legitimate comments will actually get caught.
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