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

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