Akismet problems? Can’t connect to servers

This has been a constant problem on all of my blogs. I run about 5 of them on WordPress and have been doing so since 2005 or 2006. They are not all at the same rev level, but all are experiencing a problem. The only explanation I can come up with is that I’ve been blacklisted or something. I can’t figure it out. Downgrading has not helped. Upgrading has not helped. I’d really, really, really like to see a solution to this problem. Over the weekend my main blog https://www.anythingtostopthepain.com received over 200 spam comments. The rss feeds are not working. The twitter feeds are not working. Google analytics is broken. With so many people experiencing this problem, it would seem that the WP staff would do something about it.

And I can go to my host and ping akismet servers and wordpress.com and .org. I can also telnet to the web port from an SSH connection to my host. I would have to conclude that there is not firewall that is preventing me from connecting to either set of servers. All RSS traffic has ceased on these hosts. All API-related traffic (except stats, which is working – at least the graphs are) seems to have ceased working. I can’t automatically update any of the plugins either. Extremely frustrating.

OK guys. I solved this problem! It was that my hosting company (jumpline) added allow_url_fopen = Off to the php.ini (security I guess). I overrode it in my user version of the php.ini and the problem immediately went away.