Comments on: Akismet Misses “Paris Hilton Sex Tapes” Comment Spam

By: Guera

Guera — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 20:13:35 +0000

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.

By: Dr. Mike Wendell

Dr. Mike Wendell — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 19:44:13 +0000

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.

By: Michael Clark

Michael Clark — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 19:32:47 +0000

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?

By: Dr. Mike Wendell

Dr. Mike Wendell — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 18:05:12 +0000

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.