Akismet's blacklist?? Are you on it?

by mrsray
1 replies
Have you heard of this?

there is one site that says, yes it exists!
Heads Up On Blog Commenting


sure blog commenting might be out of control ...

But be careful ... Did you know if Akismet decides to block your comments, it blocks them on all blogs where Akismet is activated (since Akismet comes preinstalled, that is a lot of WordPress blogs!)

from Banned By Akismet

how do you know that you are banned by Akismet?
The thing is you can never really tell from first glance, but the most common indication is that after you have put in your credentials, name/email/url you type your comment and when you hit enter, you get a blank page with the URL forever frozen at wp-comments.php. That's the first indication.

Has this been happening to you?

If you want to really know if Akismet is the culprit, all you need to do is go to one of your wordpress blogs and install Akismet if you haven't done so already. Then go to post on that blog, put in the same credentials and see if you are able to post a comment. It's a given that you post as a guest and not as the admin. If you still see the same wp-comments.php and a blank page, congratulations, you've been flagged by Akismet. You are officially an Akismet pariah and any comment you post using the credentials you have will not be accepted by any Akismet managed blog.

After reading around, a little the only solution I've come up with is to contact Akismet and fill out a support question. And wait until you hear back from them. Contact Us Akismet
#akismet #akismet’s #blacklist
  • Profile picture of the author ChrisCree
    Not sure where the post you reference got the idea that getting an all white screen while leaving a comment means that Akismet is marking your comments as spam. Comments that get flagged as spam by Akismet are processed normally from the commentors point of view and look no different than if they have been sent to moderation by the blog author.

    A white screen upon commenting is probably caused by a problem with the blog's theme or a plugin conflict.

    You're method of checking whether Akismet views your comments is a good test, but may not be 100% accurate because Akismet takes into account a number of factors (according to their API) such as:
    • IP Address
    • Comment Type
    • Comment Author
    • Comment Email Address
    • Comment Author URL
    • Comment Content
    Plus a few other things.

    That being the case, Akismet doesn't have a "blacklist" but rather it's a learning algorithm that makes a judgment call whether or not a specific comment is spam.

    The thing is, even with a 99% accuracy (Akismet runs a little higher than that on my sites) it is still going to miss a few, either false negatives - letting spam comments through - or false positives - marking legitimate comments as spam.

    One of my sites gets upwards of 2,000 or more spam comments a day. That means there could be as many as 20 misdiagnosed comments each day. That's at 99%. On that blog of mine it's usually fewer than 10 "errors" per day.

    The system is not perfect. But trust me, I'd much rather have to scan for those 10 than deal with the 2000+ every day!

    Everyone can help out by simply taking a glance at the spam comments every day and marking the legitimate comments Aksimet calls spam in error as "Not Spam". You can get pretty quick at it after a while because non spam comments stand out from the crowd big time.
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