Akismet picking on a legit commenter and claiming no false positives

  • Resolved TheTim

    (@thetim)


    14 years, 11 months ago

    Beginning a few days ago, Akismet has been consistently marking every single comment left by a long-time commenter on my site as spam. Every single time this happens I go into the spam queue and mark his comment “not spam” and then activate it from pending.

    This has been going on with 5-10 comments a day for the last 4-5 days, and only for this one commenter, who has thousands of approved comments and has not changed his email address, link, name, or IP recently.

    To add to the oddness of it all, when I go to the Akismet Stats page on my dashboard, Akismet reports zero “false positives” for the time period in question.

    Anybody have any idea why Akismet would be picking on one of my users and then lying to me about it?

    Also, is there a commenter spam whitelist plugin out there that actually works? I tried this one but it had no effect whatsoever.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
  • Moderator Tellyworth

    (@tellyworth)

    Please contact Akismet support with all the details you can (your API key, and the commenter’s email, IP etc).

    https://akismet.com/contact/

    It sounds like your ham reports aren’t making it to Akismet. Akismet does have a built-in whitelist feature and there’s no reason it shouldn’t work for you.

    Oh, also, is there anything in your Comment Blacklist?

    Thread Starter TheTim

    (@thetim)

    Thanks for the reply. I did fill out the Akismet contact form in addition to posting this issue here. So far I haven’t heard anything from them.

    You say that Akismet has a built-in whitelist feature, but I don’t see that anywhere in my WordPress administration menus. Where is it?

    My Comment Blacklist box is totally blank.

    Thread Starter TheTim

    (@thetim)

    Well it took a week or more for them to get back to me, and they still haven’t explained why my Akismet page lies about false positives, but at least it stopped blocking that commenter. Unfortunately I got zero explanation of what the real problem was or how they fixed it.

    One or more other Akismet users may have flagged that commentator up as a spammer. It’s a group-based system, after all, so the odd problem like this is to be expected.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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