If you’re using the test revision of the WordPress Akismet plugin and seeing messages about connectivity problems, don’t be too alarmed.
Akismet is up. Our servers are working. Our network is fine. We are not experiencing any service difficulties.
We’re still sorting through the reports to find out why people are seeing error messages.
In [...]
Remember way back when you first got interested in web design? Seems like an eternity ago in web years when I made my first clumsy web sites. Maybe you got started making home pages for friends or a local club. Maybe you helped some people get hosting accounts, set up a quick [...]
Those who like to live on the bleeding edge might like to download and test the latest revision of the Akismet WordPress plugin from Subversion:
http://plugins.svn.wordpress.org/akismet/trunk
If you don’t know what Subversion is or how to use it, I’d suggest waiting for the next official Akismet release, which won’t be far away.
The new revision includes a new [...]
The FTC has launched legal action against a Californian web hosting service it says is responsible for botnets, malware, credit card theft and of course spam. The provider has been disconnected and its operators now face a lawsuit.
The FTC alleges that Pricewert/3FN operates as a “‘rogue’ or ‘black hat’ Internet service provider that [...]
Akismet version 2.2.4 is now available. WordPress users can upgrade using the automatic plugin update feature.
Changed in this version:
Fixed a key problem affecting the stats feature in WordPress MU
Provide additional blog information in Akismet API calls
The extra blog information passed to the Akismet API will help Akismet to better adapt and provide results that [...]
Update: the problem has now been fixed.
A bug in development versions of WordPress is causing some comments to be incorrectly caught as spam. The problem is in WordPress, not Akismet, and there’s no way for Akismet to prevent it from happening.
The problem only affects WordPress blogs running current development code. It does not [...]
One of the most common forms of comment and pingback spam right now is the relatively subtle, ambiguous kind — short phrases or questions that are not obviously spam, at least on face value. Since we last posted about this, the more sophisticated spammers have progressed from old standbys like “nice post” and “great [...]
Back in the early days of blogging and when comment spamming was still fairly small scale (compared to today) one method people used to stop a spambot was to use a CAPTCHA. The idea was that a comment spambot could not read the image and so the comment would fail and you would not get [...]
Just a bit after a year after we welcomed Defensio to the market it’s just been announced that that they’re being swallowed by the public security company Websense.
Given the size of Defensio’s team and user base it probably wasn’t a huge acquisition, but this is still an important validation of the space in general as [...]
The Guardian’s Michael Pollitt says some kind words about Akismet in today’s Technology section, as he notes that Comment spammers never take a holiday.
Mullenweg publishes a graph on Akismet.com which shows comments being exceeded by daily spam peaks of more than 25m. Checking out the spam blocked counter on my blog is satisfying, showing [...]
