Comments on: How to stop your blog comments from being blocked by Akismet

By: satrap

satrap — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 08:33:00 +0000

I am pretty sure my comments are getting ought by Akismet. But, on some blogs, my comments do go through. Its kind of wired and I think it has to do with each individual blog and their style of dealing with comments. I am going to contact them and hopefully get it fixed. thanks for the info and the links.

By: Antti Kokkonen

Antti Kokkonen — Tue, 30 Nov 2010 08:07:00 +0000

As long as you post by hand, and not use any scripts/tools/whatnot to post rabidly, you should be fine.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Tue, 30 Nov 2010 04:52:00 +0000

Antti, thanks for the response and analysis. I do appreciate the need to have the detection filters; it is too much for the blog owner to do (they need to spend time writing other articles). I like the human flagging action as you point out.

My shortest posts are about 10 words in a sentence. I always stay on topic. I review my postings after they are approved (so I know it made it past moderators). I don’t see any of my posts being rejected by moderators. I don’t typically put links in the post. Do you know if posting too rapidly (whatever that might be defined as) triggers Akismet bot detection?

By: Antti Kokkonen

Antti Kokkonen — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 13:09:00 +0000

David, thanks for the comment. Personally, if I’d be forced to manually moderate all comments, including spam, I’d disable comments instead. Thus, Akismet and other spam-filters are awesome.

I’d guess the most common reason to get “blacklisted” is leaving meaningless/rude/spammy comments, and enough bloggers flag comments as spam. Thus, every Akismet user is a human moderator when marking something as spam. Most spammers try to work around this by changing their emails, but Akismet does analyze the URLs as well.

Occasionally Akismet algorithm seems to get picky on certain words, or take the the text/words on the email/URL as spam, even that there’s nothing really wrong. Also, Akismet does automatically pick up short comments (just one or couple of words) as spam.

By: David

David — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 12:51:00 +0000

I am guessing that no news means no resolution. Did Akismet respond?

By: David

David — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 12:48:00 +0000

This article was very useful in revealing a possible reason for me being blocked from posting to WP powered sites. I sent Akismet to investigate and consider removing the block. Nov 29, 2010. Now I await a response/resolution.

I also asked Akismet for advice on their guidelines to avoid detection in the future (looking for general guidelines, not specifics on how to game/bypass their detection). I also made the point that I expect human moderators to judge the quality and value of my posts, as opposed to software/bots blocking me.

By: Chris

Chris — Sun, 21 Nov 2010 14:09:00 +0000

Okay so let’s see if I’m banned…

By: Antti Kokkonen

Antti Kokkonen — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 08:31:00 +0000

I’m happy the post was useful to you. Did you get a response from Akismet Support and get off the “black list”?

By: Antti Kokkonen

Antti Kokkonen — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 08:29:00 +0000

Luckily, we can just send message to Akismet Support, they check the situation and all the work to get your name in the clear, no checking necessary. As for unfairly marking people as spammers, 99% of the time people can only blame themselves…

For example in my blog, I have a comment policy of using real name, so using just keywords as the “name” is forbidden. Every one who doesn’t comply, is a spammer, and I mark them as such.

By: Claire

Claire — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 20:02:00 +0000

It is unfortunate that someone could unfairly mark you as a spammer because they can lazily hit the spam button. It would be nice if their was a place to test it out!

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Wed, 10 Nov 2010 15:37:35 +0000

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By: Captain Kimo

Captain Kimo — Thu, 28 Oct 2010 16:52:00 +0000

Thanks for this post. Looks like I might have gotten on the spam list, will try out the recommendation.

By: Antti Kokkonen

Antti Kokkonen — Tue, 05 Oct 2010 12:40:00 +0000

Great, if you’ve indeed been blocked by Akismet, the support should help you. And isn’t Dave just awesome helping his readers like that… as mentioned on the intro, that’s how I found I was being blocked too :)

By: El Edwards

El Edwards — Sat, 02 Oct 2010 18:33:00 +0000

Thanks Antti. Dave very kindly pointed me your way after my comments kept getting spammed at his place. I’ve just followed the instructions and am keeping my fingers crossed.

By: Chris M

Chris M — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 08:00:30 +0000

two of my blogs are being filtered by askimet. luckily, i found this blog.

By: Antti Kokkonen

Antti Kokkonen — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 19:44:49 +0000

Using keywords might be against blog comment policy (each blog has rights to define their own). Not everyone want to see such an obvious keywords on their blogs, and even a normal comment seems spammy when you have keywords in the “name”. Thus, I'm not surprised your comments have been marked as spam. If you do use keywords in the “name”, your comments need to be twice as good/valuable as normally. Don't expect to get away with “nice post!” :)

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By: Antti Kokkonen

Antti Kokkonen — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 20:46:30 +0000

I have no idea how Disqus's Facebook connect works, not very well it seems... But as for spam goes, you are not blocked when you use Facebook/Twitter connect, unless your comment is spammy...

Oh, and this post is not the place to test whether or not you are blocked - you should go to http://akismetlove.wordpress.com/ -blog instead. This is my personal blog, and I "unspam" stuff that doesn't seem to be spam :)

For blogs using Disqus comments, I recommend that you register at http://disqus.com/profile/ and create your profile there. After that you never have to login or enter details when commenting on blogs with Disqus in use.

By: Antti Kokkonen

Antti Kokkonen — Sat, 10 Jul 2010 09:55:27 +0000

Susan, I'm happy this helped you – I made the post to help others in the first place after all :)

For me it took some time, but eventually Akismet support replied that they fixed the issue, and since that my comment were not stuck on the spam queue anymore.

By: Susan

Susan — Sat, 10 Jul 2010 02:22:35 +0000

This is an excellent information because this just happened to me too, when I don't comment that much. I'm hoping to get the problem rectified!

By: Antti Kokkonen

Antti Kokkonen — Sun, 27 Jun 2010 23:03:01 +0000

Update: When leaving a comment on the “Akismet test” post, type in a comment with more than one word, a full sentence preferably. I noticed that comments with just “testing” get caught by Akismet. I updated the instructions on the post as well.

By: Antti Kokkonen

Antti Kokkonen — Sun, 27 Jun 2010 22:31:13 +0000

I'm sorry, I don't understand your comment…

Did you try to say that you left a comment on the “Akismet test” post and it didn't appear? If so, then your comment has been marked as spam and you should contact Akismet support. As said, sometimes that just happens.