Comments on: Switching from Spam Karma 2 to Akismet

By: Gavin Ingham

Gavin Ingham — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 09:19:37 +0000

Firstly, great blog… so much of interest and use on it.

And secondly, on to Askimet!! Until about 3 months or so ago Askimet span worked fine for me stopping 90%+ of spam and with what seemed high accuracy. Then over night everything changed. Askimet stopped catching spam and stopped being able to see what was and what was not spam.

I am sure that I do not get that much spam compared to some but comments on other sites such as read your spam comments are not really practical (I get several hundred a day and rising) and totally negate the point of having it in the first place.

Over the last day or two the stats were as follows…

Total comments & spam 359.
Awaiting moderation 174 – Spam 170, legitimate 4.
Askimet spam 185 – Spam 168, legitimate 7.

This would imply that Askimet is guessing and not that well at that. I have emailed Askimet to ask for advice but would be interested if anyone else has experienced a rapid change in fortunes with Askimet, what caused it and what the solution is…

By: David Esrati

David Esrati — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 14:25:17 +0000

While Dr. Dave said he was giving up SK- he gave it up to the community- to see what others do with it.
http://unknowngenius.com/blog/archives/2008/07/14/spam-karma-is-gpl/
SK still works just fine.
I totally agree with Dave that Akismet doesn’t seem to make sense: “As for WP coming bundled with its own anti-spam plugin, I could also go on for hours on that. The fact that a community-based open-source project is used to distribute a commercially licensed piece of software doesn’t make me particularly happy.”

By: Holly

Holly — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 13:19:32 +0000

Today’s the day. No more SK2. 7/16/2008 SK2 RIP

By: Chris L

Chris L — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 16:00:28 +0000

I don’t know, guess I have good mojo. The combination seems to be relatively common. I think there is some kind of plugin to feed Spam Karma caught spam to Akismet, which makes me suspect that in the ordinary run of things that doesn’t happen at all. But your mileage may vary.

By: dnorman

dnorman — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 04:07:32 +0000

@chris: the last time I tried mixing Akismet with anything else, the non-akismet spamcop wound up feeding false negatives back to Akismet and I got blacklisted or something. I talked with Matt and it got cleared up, but it’s left me a bit leery about mixing the dark arts.

By: Chris L

Chris L — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 00:30:55 +0000

I’m only about 175,000 spams blocked, but I am using Spam Karma *and* Akismet with fair success. very few false positives… though I am still surprised at some of the things it puts in moderation that are so obviously spam!

Google’s shown very little interest in trying to deal with the problem. Philosophically, I can understand why, even if I don’t agree with it. The one thing they DID do (the nofollow tag) is a disaster, killing off as much good credit as bad…

By: dnorman

dnorman — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 05:46:10 +0000

@david: you’re 3 for 3 under Akismet. That last one was flagged as spam as well. I’m going to see if there’s a way to let them know about that asap.

By: David Esrati

David Esrati — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 04:46:06 +0000

I don’t spam other blogs- but, I have been following up every post about me in my election.
I didn’t have very good luck with akismet- same sort of behavior.
Google could easily solve this problem- by shutting scraper sites and every other site on the host machine out. It would end spam comments in about a day. Please do talk to auttomatic- and ask them to make peace with Dr. Dave and try his route- much more effective.

By: dnorman

dnorman — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 04:34:41 +0000

@david: almost forgot. the “you are being watched” thing is from the Voyeur plugin for wordpress. It adds yet another set of stats to obsess over, this time tracking people who have commented and when they’ve come back to visit. Kind of interesting (actually, very interesting) but a little creepy. I’m trying to hit the “disable” button, but haven’t been able to pull the trigger yet…

Info on Blog Voyeur: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/blog-voyeur/

By: dnorman

dnorman — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 04:29:33 +0000

@david: it flagged you as spam again. dangit! wtf, akismet? or are you busy spamming other blogs At this rate, I don’t trust Akismet, which is far worse than having to moderate a few comments each day. I’ll give it a week to smarten up, then it’s back to SK2. If only I had the opportunity to talk with the Automattic team in person. Oh, wait. They’ll be at Northern Voice. I’ll be sure to raise this…

@alan: yeah. fracking spammers. Google needs a big fat “report a url as spam” that lets people submit a suspected spam site to be checked out. Can’t be automatic – that would cause narc wars – but it could put all click-payments to be put into an escrow-like account so the suspected spammers don’t see a cent until a Google rep has greenlighted their url(s). easy fix. it would just take money. if only Google had access to some of that…