You blog voraciously. You post valuable content on your blog and are hell bent in making visitors come to your blog repetitively and comment like a busy day on Wall Street. You go around, searching for blogs in your niche and following the perfect Bloggers’ Etiquette Bible, post valuable comments on the other bloggers’ posts and share a quick tip or two here and there. As bloggers are increasingly preferring WordPress as their blogging platform and, suddenly, you realize that you are marked as Spam by Akismet.
As Akismet is the reigning leader in spam filtering, and most of the blogs running around use WordPress, it will be evident to you in a short time that your comments are being moderated and there are no conversations in your mail box. What to do? How to come out of this dreaded loop?
The Simple way is to contact the Akismet Team and request them to check the authenticity of your blog and your comments from the past posts. Send them links to your comments where you have started a fiery conversation on popular posts and urge them to check one more time. I am pasting an excerpt from the Akismet FAQ which states that marking a regular comment as Spam is common and they would definitely correct the mistake, in a day or two.
Help! Akismet is catching a regular comment as spam!
Don’t worry, if you see a regular comment on your Akismet page, just click the “Approve” button or the “Not Spam” checkbox and submit and the comment will be sent back to Akismet as a mistake. The system will learn from your submission, though it may take a day or so in some cases. False positives, as they’re called, are extremely rare and we watch them closely.
As easy as being marked as Spam.
Share your experiences if you had been marked as Spam by Akismet and how you rectified yourself. It would be a good tip for the readers.
[...] – Posts about Blogging as of August 6, 2009 My Comments Are NOT Spam-Akismet Are You Listening – teamnirvana.com 08/06/2009 You blog voraciously. You post valuable content on your blog and [...]
Others than AKismet.. There’s a wp plugin .. I’ve used Spam Karma and sometimes the comments go to blacklist. And I get complain from readers..
But that’s blogging.. Sometimes it not in good condition..
Thanks 4 comment at my blog.. I really hope we can learn somethin.
Aww, that’s too bad.
Friends have had that experience too on my site. Their perfectly legal comments end up stuck in the Akismet spam filter. What’s even crazier is that you have to sift through ALL the spam comments to un-spam comments that are okay :/
The fact that Akismet is the property of Automattic makes it more trustful because of the reserves the WordPress Team has got and the authority over realizing which is spam and which is not.
Yes, Siyab. The painstaking business of checking all the spam comments too bears upon being a blogger. But, I presume using a simple captcha would reduce the number of spam comments by the bots.
If humans have gone down into spamming, then we need to be extra careful to preserve the reliability of the comment sections in the long run.
Well, I guess nothing is perfect then. We just need to compare its benefit and its harm.
On my site I find Akismet quite reasonable. It catches those who link to sales page, write 2 or more link on the comments, irrelevant comments, pure spammers, suspected duplicate comments, etc. I apply personal moderation for them.
Btw thanks for commenting on my site
I totally agree with you Isaac. Akismet is a boon for WordPress Self hosted blog users.
At times, there are some sales URLs which are marked just like valid comments. That’s the area where human intervention is required. Other than that Spam and Ham are absolutely fine.
Dude try mollom Plugin …
Mollom looks good as long our blogs do not hit the front pages of social bookmarking sites Sham.
And once, the comments reach 100(legitimate) imagine the spam bots crawling around the top posts in SB sites trying to spam them. So, I presume using Akismet, which is reliable and cost effective(read, Free), Mollom is not my piece of cake.
Thanks for letting me know of this new Spam protection.
Akismet is not a bad barrier for spam comments.
I think it is good thing.
Surender Sharma´s last blog ..Indian Independence day Dreamhost web hosting offer
Absolutely true Surender.
Akismet is one of the best things that should be used with WordPress blogs.
The ease of use and the competency of Akismet plugin makes it a blessing in disguise to protect from the spammers around.
Akismet is completely automated, so if some bloggers have marked your comment as spam, next time onwards it would automatically mark your comment as spam.
Off-topic : how I reduced spam by 99.99% – http://techpp.com/2009/02/08/how-i-reduced-spam-by-9999-on-my-wordpress-blog/
hope people here find it useful