Spam troubles.

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spam_blocker

I use Akismet, the spam blocker WordPress offers, and it’s an excellent tool. I get so much spam I don’t know what I’d do without it.

You have the option of setting it up to either automatically delete all spam so you do nothing, or to send it to a special “spam folder” for later review/deletion.

I opted for the second, because sometimes Akismet makes mistakes. I have had legitimate comments wind up in my spam folder, as well as spam that somehow never got flagged as spam and wound up in my regular comments folder waiting to be approved.

Legitimate comments that wind up as “spam” usually contain links–I think the limit is two. If your comment includes more than two links, Akismet thinks it’s spam and I have to manually unspam it. But for some reason, one lady’s comments always go to my spam folder even though they contain no links at all!

It’s a pain having to manually go through my spam messages every day because sometimes there are hundreds, but it would be worse to have legitimate comments automatically deleted so I’ll continue to manually review all spam before I send it to the Trash.

9 thoughts on “Spam troubles.”

  2. What a pain to deal with so much spam. The price of being so popular, I guess. If you have a recidivist spammer, can they be reported to their internet provider or something? I believe you can set up your spam filter to block all comments from particular people and websites, so that might save a bit of time. Good luck.

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    • I’ll look into if there’s a way to do that. If I start getting much more spam, I might not have a choice except to set my spam blocker to automatically delete spam and ask commenters not to include more than one or two links in their posts.

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  3. I’ve had the same experience — a legitimate comment ends up in the spam, or a spam comment slips past the filter — but the system works well most of the time, thank goodness. You might want to warn your readers that if they don’t have a gravatar, their comments are more likely to end up in the spam filter.

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    • Really? I will do that. I didn’t know not having a gravatar could make your comments wind up in spam. Most of my commenters get a default “monster” avatar if they lack a gravatar and their comments still don’t wind up in spam. But yes, I should put some kind of warning.

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  4. I, too, like to review my spam folder to pull out comments that don’t belong in there. I agree that I would hate to lose one contribution from one of my readers. This week, I discovered how smart Akismet is, and wrote about it on my blog. You might be surprised how tricky commenters can be!

    You mentioned that when a comment contains more than a certain number of links, it goes to the spam folder. You can set the tolerance: go to your Dashboard, then Settings > Discussion. Scroll down to Comment Moderation, and specify how many links can be in a comment. I change this number when I ask for comments that include links to things like people’s favorite sites, and then I change it back. You will find other settings for controlling spam on your Discussion page, but I recommend using the filters with great caution: think about how many legitimate comments could get filtered out.

    By the way, I appreciate your name, and all the hope that it radiates. I also appreciate your road of Recovery. I sometimes write about mine on my blog, too. I hope to see you there 🙂

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    • Thank you for this information. I may do this tonight. Then Imight set Akismet to automatically delete spam once I know legit comments with links won’t go in there. It’s so tedious going through all that spam every day. :/

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