Sometimes I end up digging new users out of the spam queue, who have done nothing more than post half a dozen links to one of several topic-related websites. Akismet gets them, even though I know the domain they are linking to is entirely legitimate in the context of the forum. This is a specific problem for new users, so creating a filter based on user role or posting history does not solve the problem.

I’ve started looking at whitelisting domains within links: A link to a whitelisted domain will always be considered legitimate, regardless of the number of links, or proportion of the post containing links.

The BBPress plugin does not support this. Probably because the Akismet API doesn’t appear to support it: One submits the whole post content as comment_content, and waits for a result. No white-listing options I could see.

The crudest possible solution is to hack an escape clause into bb_ksd_check_post(), which simply says “if post content contains a whitelisted domain reference, skip Akismet”. Works right up until the point at which the spammer sees the pattern…

My next idea was to extract all the whitelisted links from the content, send the rest to Akismet, and then put the links back into whatever is sent back. Somehow. Simplest method was probably converting whitelisted anchors into comments, but I’m not sure that Akismet will step over comments. Does it?

Or I could just disable Akismet and find another solution.

So, I thought I’d ask here, if anyone has a clever way to whitelist certain domains?

[_ck_Participant @_ck_ 4 years ago]

Akismet has lost it’s mind over the past several weeks or so.

Lack of whitelisting (as you discovered) is one of several pitfalls of using a remote service.

You could look at how my skip-akismet plugin works and check when $_POST contains submitted $_POST – if ‘post_content’ has only those whitelisted domains, you can unhook akismet as I do for mods, etc.

There’s also another possibly I have been considering – only send to akismet the first few dozen posts by any new member. After that many they’ve probably met with your approval and any other moderation should be done manually, not automatically.

[Simon WheatleyMember @simonwheatley 3 years, 9 months ago]

There’s also another possibly I have been considering – only send to akismet the first few dozen posts by any new member. After that many they’ve probably met with your approval and any other moderation should be done manually, not automatically.

This is a very tempting solution. We’re getting so many false positives I turned off Akismet over the weekend, but inevitably Spam flowed in through the unmanned defences. Talk about being caught between a rock and a hard place!