Has anyone else noticed a large increase in the amount of comment spam that Akismet is missing this week? I’ve tagged and deleted more comment spam in the past week than I have in the past 6 months. I would guess across all of my WordPress sites, I’m manually tagging 10 messages a day. That is a huge increase. Are the spammers simply attacking at a higher rate? Or is Akismet not as effective as it used to be?

And why can’t Akismet learn that a comment in the format of: “eight words, all lowercase, all at least 7 letters long, a link inside an anchor tag, then the close tag, then a URL” is spam?

A setting you can make to help under WordPress 2.5: Go to the Settings tab, then the Discussion sub-tab. Under “Comment Moderation” have a “1″ for “Hold a comment in the queue if it contains __ or more links.”

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This entry was posted on Friday, April 18th, 2008 at 6:21 am and is filed under Spam, WordPress. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.