Akismet Blues

3 January 2008

I do like British chocolate, but it is hardly famous outside of our commonwealth, it being mostly composed of sugar, fat and 'non-milk solids', whatever they are (no I probably do not want to know). We had better not even mention American chocolate.

So that brings us to European chocolate.

A company called Fazer make my favourite Finnish chocolate bar called simply "sininen maitosuklaa" (blue milk chocolate). Fazer also make another chocolate bar called a Kismet, it tastes similar to a 'blue riband' if you ever had one of those, basically a sweet wafer covered in chocolate.

Anyhow, I had a bit of software running on my blog called Akismet, which unlike the closely named bar has not been very nice. The idea of the software is to block spammers. I knew it had some false positives but it seems that for the last week or so it has blocked absolutely everyone. As in the following image where it is was blocking even me:

Apologies if you have been blocked by this, you are not the only one. Thanks to everyone who emailed me about it. I have turned the bugger off. Hopefully I won't be too covered in spam between now and whenever I get time to debug it to find out what has gone wrong.

1 Paul says...

I'm surprised you've had so many problems with Akismet - I've used it for years now and I haven't noticed a big streak of false positives. It's stopped well over 100,000 spam comments on my blog in the last few years.

If it's not working for you, I'd suggest dropping the Akismet team a line, they're pretty friendly and will probably want to know if something is wrong.

Posted at 12:15 p.m. on January 3, 2008

2 Zet says...

Hi Paul, thanks for the comment.

My initial hunch is that upstream changes in Akismet have not been reflected in the Pyblosxom plugin.

It won't take me too long to read through the plugin code but I am a bit too busy for the next two weeks. You know how it goes, everything happens at once. When it rains, it pours.

The akismet check happens before the word test below, so hopefully most of the spam bots will lose on that, and on the fact that I am not using Wordpress anymore.

Posted at 12:59 p.m. on January 3, 2008

3 John Reese says...

You'll want to be sure that your Akismet plugin is correctly connecting to the Akismet server for its spam checks. If it cannot connect, that may be causing an error or exception that results in a false positive for safety's sake (or poor coding). I know that I use it on my sites and generally get more false negatives than false positives, which is how I prefer it. I'd rather see a few spams slip through than stifle my real comments by accident.

Posted at 8:11 p.m. on January 3, 2008

What do you have to say?

Show Editing Help

About

Hello, my name is Zeth, I'll be your host here.

Command Line Warriors is about taking control of your own technology, it looks at our experiences of computing; especially using GNU/Linux, the Python programming language, the command-line and issues such as techno-ethics, best practices and whatever is cool now. If you take control of your technology then you are a Warrior too!

This site is your site too which means that you can contribute and get involved. You can leave comments using the facility provided. For me, the comments and discussions are by far the best part of the site. So please do have your say!

Latest Discussions

Nui

July 18, 2008
Hmm, this would be more persuasive as an argument with some evidence. I am a happy admin of Windows and a novice user of Linux, so I have taken the ...
→ Give Linux a chance

Paddy3118

July 18, 2008
Hi, I too work with Electronic Design Automation tools, where Tcl is used extensively. I tend to only occasionally have to write in Tcl and so find the TclTutor utility: ...
→ Python and TCL

Cliff Wells

July 17, 2008
I personally cannot live without the Web Developer extension or Firebug. Unfortunately these are probably both among the more difficult to port extensions. Given how poorly Firefox functions on Linux ...
→ Will Epiphany be able to compete with Firefox's extensions?

making money on the internet

July 17, 2008
[url=http://www.divinecaroline.com/public/user/profile?user_id=83997]extra money 101waystoincome.com[/url]
→ A year after my 2007 predictions - the score card

Leatherjackets99

July 16, 2008
New Style in Leather Jackets For Man and Woman at http://www.Leatherjackets99.com They Offer Free Shipment Worldwide.
→ Email Syntax Check in Python

Åke Forslund

July 13, 2008
I'm pretty much a novice in both of these languages but I find them both easy to use and preform the tasks I give them. However I rarely use them ...
→ Python and TCL

Christopher Thoday

July 12, 2008
A single test is not sufficient to give you confidence that the algorithm is working. You should make 'number' an argument of 'main' so that you can test some boundary ...
→ Python and TCL

paul21

July 10, 2008
Shame on Mozilla. They should make developers specify the extension license before hosting it. They should show the license next to download button as well.
→ Are your Firefox extensions proprietary software?

Tris

July 8, 2008
Justin - You say they had not heard of Linux? That doesn't sound very professional to me!
→ Give Linux a chance

michael

July 8, 2008
what about Galeon? in Gnome i use Galeon mostly. it is fast and stable and has a nice portal with search masks for Debian, FSF, Freshmeat and so on. wtf ...
→ Will Epiphany be able to compete with Firefox's extensions?

vermin

July 7, 2008
> Eventually, after a bit of digging and Googling, I found their Toolbar-License... You simply found the license of the StumbleUpon Toolbar for Internet Explorer. This is another product, much ...
→ Are your Firefox extensions proprietary software?

Andrew West

July 6, 2008
Both the Python and the Tcl example could do with error checking. While at first this may not seem on topic with the post I think it better shows the ...
→ Python and TCL

Kurushiyama

June 30, 2008
XML is no replacement for SGML, it's a subset.
→ An Introduction to ReStructuredText

COMMAND LINE WARRIORS

Taking Control of your Own Technology