Spam passes Akismet filters
Posted on 27/8/06 by Felix Geisendörfer
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Update: It seems like Akismet is back up and running and the error has disappeared. Checkout this blog entry for more detailed information.
Right now there seems to be a huge amount of spam comments passing Akismet's normally excellent spam filters like they wouldn't be there.
The blogsphere is full of people who are experiencing spam attacks like me and some of them already started to disable their comment functions.
My investigation has shown that Akismet is throwing an error right now that looks like this:
Database error: [Duplicate entry '376dg34af7cj-thinkingphp.org' for key 1]
INSERT INTO key_stats (api_key, blog, da, ham) VALUES ('376dg34af7cj', 'thinkingphp.org', '2006-08-27', 1)
To me it seems very likely that this is related to the anouncment they made on their blog yesterday, to have improved the tracking of statistics for individuals keys.
Well, I just hope they get this bug fixed very soon, because otherwise I'll have to temporarly disable comments on here as well until I have a working solution.
--Felix Geisendörfer aka the_undefined
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Hi enygma, you are running phpdeveloper.org? Cool to see you around and thanks for linking to my blog postings so far ; ). Regarding the spam: I think the problem is on Akismet's site. I know I could probably get rid of the spam manually by changing the form with some css-hidden fields that are not supposed to be changed. But I still hope I'll get around that ; ).
For better Spam protection I recommend using one of the following combinations:
a) SK2 with Akismet Plugin - works straight out of the box and blocks nearly every spam attempt. combines the Akismet with the strong Spam Karma 2 Engine ;)
b) Akismet + Did You Pass Math? + Trackback Validator - Pascal is successfully using this combination (at least according to his own statements)
cu, w0lf.
Thanks for figuring this out. After deleting spam all yesterday and waking up to MANY more this morning I was starting to wonder if Akismet was broken. I'm surprised that there is no mention of this on their blog or on digg.
fwolf: I'm not going to change the setup on this blog unless I really have to. I'm working on a new blog, powered by the CakePHP framework and I'll implement my own spam logic in there (including Akismet and maybe others). Meanwhile I just am happy to see Akismet back up ; ).
hypercubed: Yeah, I as kind of surprised this didn't make news imidiatly too, because there are a lot of blogs that got spammed I think.
[...] Spam passes Akismet filters [...]
Askimet has worked well for us also. It's been a lot of headaches with the hundreds of comments/day we'd get sometimes but we're starting to notice a lot of improvements. I believe there ssite was down indeed.
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good you posted this. I was wondering why Akismet was not catching anything for past 2 or 3 days.
Ah thanks for that, I wondered why I had an influx of spam on my WP blog!
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I've been getting more spam to my pages too - I have a keyword filter, a regex filter, and Akismet and normally that's more than enough. Turns out, though, that the spammers were just posting to the page (not using the form) so I threw in a check for that and the spam has dropped off to nothing.