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 blog”, [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
We did some upgrades to the system last night to do some more finely grained tracking of the per blog and per key amounts of spam, ham, and mistakes moving through the system. It’s starting to expose some interesting data, and it’s kinda fun to play with. I’m curious if folks would be interested in [...]
Some enterprising folks have made Akismet available for Expression Engine.
We’ve been getting several reports of errors with Akismet after people upgrade to Movable Type 3.31. To be honest we’re not Perl hackers so if you have any clues what might be causing the error and we’ll update this entry with information on a workaround or a new version of the plugin.
Dave is developing an Akismet mod for Coppermine, if you use Coppermine to manage your online photos check it out.
Joel Thoms of Joel.net has written a .NET 2.0 library for Akismet, which we’ve added to our development page. We’ve also had another one of these sent in that I need to upload to the site somewhere. If you’re on a Microsoft platform and need spam protection for any application that takes user input, this [...]
