Dear Akismet…
So there I am, minding my own business, checking my feeds, responding to reader comments. Suddenly, I noticed that my last comment hasn’t shown up. Thanks to the ever-paranoid Akismet, it was marked as spam. Fortunately, I was able to locate it in the Akismet admin among 800+ pieces of actual spam. I marked it not spam, so you can actually read the comment now.
First, I have no idea why it was flagged as spam. Far as I can tell, there’s no big keywords that I would suspect in it. Second, and this is most important, I was once again logged in as a WordPress admin when this happened. Yes, this has happened before, about six months ago.
Dear Akismet…if the person posting the comment is logged in as a WordPress admin…it’s probably not spam. Even if it is spam, they’re logged in as a WordPress admin. All they have to do is go to the “manage” page and get their comment out of the spam jail. Blocking spam for people with high privileges is, at best, only going to slow someone down. At worst, well…it pisses me off. Did I mention I was logged in as a WordPress admin?
Yes, I am running v.lates of the Akismet plugin (1.2.1). And yes, I have the source to the Akismet plugin so I suppose I could jump in with my own two hands and deal with this code kung-foo style and perhaps that’s what I’ll do. Until then, I’m going to sit here and stew a bit (and scan my 800+ pieces of spam for anything else Akismet put in there). Maybe Toni will crack the Automattic whip for me.
January 2nd, 2007 at 2:23 am
Dear Ryan, sorry!
Sometimes I screw up, my only redeeming quality is that I usually learn from my mistakes. I blame this one on too much eggnog.
On the bright side, this screw up combined with the other false positives and missed spam you’ve reported still has my batting average at 99.99882% accuracy for your blog.
But I’ll try harder and make sure not to axe you when you’re logged in as admin, which is a little silly. If you run into any problems again, feel free to contact me.
Here’s to a spam-free 2007!
January 2nd, 2007 at 9:54 am
Holy AI, Batman! That’s pretty impressive that: 1) Akismet is at 4-9’s and 2) Akismet keeps track of that. Okay, maybe it’s not that impressive that Akismet tracks it. But it is nice. When will you be adding the ability to fetch that number to the API?
January 2nd, 2007 at 11:38 am
We’ve always kept key/blog aggregate stats, and since a month or so ago we’ve kept daily stats for everyone. The plan is to make it available as flashy graphs in your WP.com dashboard, you’ll be able to see the stats for all your blogs in one place. If I can figure a sane way to put it into XML through our normal API stuff, I will.
January 2nd, 2007 at 2:19 pm
You could do something simple like stick it in the HTTP response headers. Then you’d just be piggybacking the data along with the response, similar to how feed aggregators report subscriber numbers to feed generators (I’m pretty sure many of them do that in the user agent header of the request). Then it’s available for anyone who wants to read it.
January 10th, 2007 at 12:41 pm
i am working on hacking akismet to leave logged in user comments alone. BRB if i get it working.
January 10th, 2007 at 1:12 pm
Love to know if you find this works (i’m trialling it myself). In akismet plugin file, find function “ksd_auto_check_comment” and add these lines
get_currentuserinfo();
if ( !$user_ID ) {
before the line near the start which begins $comment['user_ip'] and then add an end “}” before the “return” line.
hope that’s clear