Akismet is a great spam-filtering service for WordPress that did wonders for my blog. Actually, it’s quite generic and can be used with any commenting service, for example with Trac (I used this for Open Yahtzee’s Trac before reverting back to SourceForge’s new ticket system). For a long time, Akismet allowed me to blog without worrying much about spam, as it hardly missed any – usually fewer than 5 spam messages a month. But something went wrong in the last three months, as can be seen in this chart:
As you can see, the number of missed spam messages increased rapidly from February to May (more than 15-fold), while the number of overall spam messages decreased. I have to manually mark the missed spam, and I really can’t say why some of them are missed. They are as spammy as always and surely not unique in any sense.
Although it’s not a deluge of missed spam, I really don’t like dealing with it, so I am considering adding CAPTCHA to supplement Akismet. This will also help with my backups, because Akismet keeps all the spam messages it flags for 15 days, which means that unfortunately I back up more than 20,000 spam messages each week (hopefully, one day I’ll find a good use for them).
Has something gone wrong with Akismet? Do you experience the same problems?
Happens to me on wordpress.com lately, too. Very anoying. I like keeping my commenting as open as possible, and now I consider enabling pre-approval, which really sucks.
Yeah, pre-approval always gives me a connotation of censorship. Alas, if I won’t be able to get the CAPTCHA to work nicely with Akismet, I’ll resort to it.
I’ve installed WP-reCAPTCHA, hopefully it will reverse that negative trend.
I am seeing a fair number of spam comments. I am using Akismet.
This is a low-traffic blog, too.
Installing WP-reCAPTCHA dealt with the spame problem for me.