We found a small bug in the Akismet plugin under WordPress 1.5 that would cause it to throw errors when you tried to mark something as “not spam” and submit it as a false positive.

If you’ve had this problem, please download the latest version of the plugin (1.06) and let us know if that fixes the problem for you.

Since we started tracking stats under two weeks ago, Akismet has already blocked over a hundred thousand spams for its users. I had no idea we would hit that number so quickly.

There has been a ton of great feedback on blogs thus far about Akismet, which I’ll blog about soon, but this post really stood out to me for its clever title:

Akismet Creates Comments Glasnot

Cool!

We’ve gotten a few reports of people getting a key error when submitting a false positive, and we’re trying to track down that bug now.

When we were testing with the beta testers the percentage of spam in total comments was about 64%, as of writing this it has risen to over 78% and is hovering near 80% day-to-day. It’s been interesting to watch as new people join the network the sheer volume of spam they get. The blog who has gotten the most spam comment thus far has had 99.51% of his comments caught as spam, thousands a day. (And no false positives.)

If email is any indication this is a trend that’s only going to continue. What better time to upgrade your spam protection system to Akismet? 🙂

We’ve moved the database to a brand new machine specifically tuned for database performance, so if you thought it was fast before, now it’ll be even more so.

We’ve also added an auto-discovery link for this blog’s RSS feed, so it should be easier to get to now.

Your privacy is important, which is why we’ve put up a skeleton privacy policy for your feedback and revisions before we send it off to be translated into legalese that no one ever reads. Now is the time to point out anything missing or not addressed and have a real effect on the final product.

Well if the rush of traffic is any indication, we’re live now. Where did all you fine folks come from?

Anyway, welcome and I hope you enjoy learning about Akismet, maybe even enough to try it out on your spam problems.

If you have any questions not in the FAQ please contact us!

I wanted to welcome everybody to the Akismet blog. You can subscribe to the feed for the latest updates on Akismet development and service changes. We’ll also try to keep tabs on spam in general in the blogosphere, since that’s something we’ve gotten to know very well. Hopefully we can take the weight of spam off the shoulders of the blogosphere and let people focus on what really matters — writing and creating content.