As much as I love using Akismet for getting rid of comment spam on my blogs, it is extremely frustrating that for some oddball reason, Akismet rarely catches spam that discusses Paris Hilton’s sex antics. I dutifully tag them as spam, but for whatever reason, Akismet won’t learn that Ms. Hilton’s shenanigans aren’t a real comment.
The same thing happens with email using SpamAssassin. Just this morning, one of my users complained to me about a bunch of messages that were getting through safely. I watched the logs and tweaked the SA rules a bit, so hopefully that will help that user.
I really like that SpamAssassin’s rules can be tweaked and modified as needed. But Akismet is a closed to the world, we throw data into it, and what comes out is what comes out. I see that in 2005 someone worked on integrating SpamAssassin into WordPress, but stopped development. I wonder if it should be taken up again? Or maybe just a new plugin is needed that allows WordPress blog owners to add in some custom rules. I don’t think the built-in “Comment Blacklist” is enough.
We had to get rid of Akismet from all of our servers due to it’s questionable licensing (Since it requires an API key, it’s not open source and therefore not GPL’ed.) and moved over to a SpamAssassin solution. I just found that plugin today in fact and was looking to see if anyone had looked at it. Not being able to figure out why some folks (ie paying clients) were caught and not being able to whitelist them also was an issue.
Akismet really needs a whitelist.
I see you’re not using or supporting WordPress any more. Are you aware of a SpamAssassin comment plugin for WP? Or are you using one that is for Movable Type only?
There’s this one: Link
On my own MT blog, I’m just using the built in Spam Lookup plugins that come with the software.
I do webhosting and we support about 30 different platforms, most of them with Akismet plugins. We just stuck SA on a box by itself (it’s a memory hog when you get it up to speed with a large install) and pointed all the spam checks to that box instead. For wordpress, we based it on the plugin there but made a few changes like checking trackbacks first to see if they’re really coming from the site in question, check against a local IP address blacklist, etc.
Trying to get clients who, for whatever reason got blacklisted by Akismet, was a really big pain.
I also have this problem in my blog. Obvious things such as “TOP 10 WAYS TO GET RICH OVER NIGHT” go through which I really don’t like. There must be some spam removal out there that is better. 🙂 Akismet is not good at all.