I’m having major issues with Akismet not catching SPAM.

From March 2011 – March 2012 Akismet missed a total of three SPAM posts.

This month alone Akismet has missed 117 SPAM posts and counting. This all started when I switched to bbPress 2.0.

Any ideas as to what could be happening?

[@lynq Participant 12 years, 8 months ago]

I am not sure but there is a large answer to this question on the akismet website.

http://akismet.com/support/#ht9

The one in particular which is interesting and means you could of changed nothing your end but your hosting did change something is the load balancing.

Good luck!

[@baldg0at Participant 12 years, 8 months ago]

Thanks Lynq,

I’m not having an issue with false positives, but actually SPAM posts that get through that normally get caught by Akismet.

[@baldg0at Participant 12 years, 8 months ago]

At 440 missed SPAM posts for the month – an average of 19 per day.

Between this and the issues with WP Super Cache, I’m starting to lose users.

I don’t want to sound ungrateful. I wish I had the knowledge & time to be helpful with these issues.

How are things looking with 2.1? Should I expect some fixes that address these issues?

I looked through trac and saw a couple tickets regarding Akismet, but couldn’t tell if they’d help with the missed SPAM. I didn’t see anything regarding caching.

[@baldg0at Participant 12 years, 7 months ago]

Just checking to see if anyone can answer my latest 2 questions.

Thanks

[@johnjamesjacoby Keymaster 12 years, 7 months ago]

There isn’t anything bbPress can do to make Akismet work any better. It’s just heuristics and monitoring. Akismet misses a ton of spam here on bbPress.org, too.

On the Super Cache front, some improvements went in, but I haven’t spent a lot of time with them together; you probably have more than I have.

[@jaredatch Member 12 years, 7 months ago]

Look through the WP.org repo (https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/search.php?q=bbpress) – there are a few plugins that should help with this depending on what method you want to use (such as recaptcha etc).

[@baldg0at Participant 12 years, 7 months ago]

@jaredatch I already have recaptcha set up on registration. I’ll check to see if there are other plugins that will assist, but SPAMMERs are actually using humans to do the registration part these days. They’re tenacious.

@John James Jacoby

It just seems very odd that I’ve had such a huge spike in missed SPAM since switching from the standalone to the plugin.

I was hoping this ticket would make it into 2.1 and help with the issue

https://bbpress.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/1623

[@jaredatch Member 12 years, 7 months ago]

As a moderator here (and this runs pre 2.x bbPress) there is a *lot* of spam that gets through. Every morning I go through and delete everything that has popped up over night

[@baldg0at Participant 12 years, 7 months ago]

@jaredatch

Ok, so now imagine you come in one morning and the amount of SPAM you have to clean up is 1000 times the normal amount. Literally, 1000 times.

I understand that there will always be some SPAM that gets through, but we went from averaging .25 missed SPAM posts a month in the previous 12 months to having 1,138 missed SPAM posts in April.

We pay the enterprise level for the Akismet service and it has always done a great job for us until now.

I don’t want to come off as sounding angry, because I’m really not. I just want to make sure that we aren’t too quick to dismiss the possibility that bbPress’ implementation of the Akismet API could be improved.

Perhaps the ticket I noted is an indication that there could be an improvement made?

Here is the description from that ticket —

“The Akismet folk have suggested that adding user roles to the info submitted to Akismet would allow them to do a better job of checking comments for spam. The forthcoming patch adds the appropriate info.”

[@jaredatch Member 12 years, 7 months ago]

I completely agree things could be improved.

I’m just not sure how much of that is on bbPress and how much of that is on Akismet.

On bbPress.org one of the major problems we run into is the majority of the spam is from human spammers – so no matter what reCaptcha/human test (etc) is in place they will get around this.

Some of the plugins (such as https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/bbpressmoderation/) try to get around this where a user must have a previously approved post before their posts show up.

[@baldg0at Participant 12 years, 7 months ago]

Thanks. I’ll take a look at that.

Is there any way you could find out where things stand on the ticket I mentioned?

[@micheal11 Member 12 years, 7 months ago]

We have to know that Askimetnis not a human, what I recommend is Captcha. I think that it’s the better tool to fight against spamming

http://www.first-names-meanings.com

[@pimarts Participant 12 years, 7 months ago]

What works for me (I’ve had my share of spammers, but they’re no problem whatsoever anymore):

Only do this if you know what you’re doing.

1) Put the following blacklist thing in your htaccess:

http://perishablepress.com/5g-blacklist-2012/

2) Put a question in the registration process with BuddyPress Humanity (I’m sure something like this exists for WordPress too).

https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/buddypress-humanity/

3) Install the Bad Behaviour plugin :

https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/bad-behavior/

4) Install the Ban Hammer plugin :

https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/ban-hammer/

Works like a charm. For me at least.

[@mrjerseys Member 12 years, 7 months ago]

We pay the enterprise level for the Akismet service and it has always done a great job for us until now.