Akismet has detected a problem…

A few possibly associated errors that I’m seeing are below:

PHP Warning: htmlspecialchars() [<a href='function.htmlspecialchars'>function.htmlspecialchars</a>]: Invalid multibyte sequence in argument in /home/websites/domain/web/public/wp-includes/formatting.php on line 3058, referer: https://website.com/wp-admin/

PHP Warning: htmlspecialchars() [<a href='function.htmlspecialchars'>function.htmlspecialchars</a>]: Invalid multibyte sequence in argument in /home/websites/domain/web/public/wp-includes/formatting.php on line 3058, referer: https://website.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=akismet-key-config

Not sure what to make of those errors though, but I’m pretty sure this wasn’t happening until the upgrade(s) that I put in place last night.

I’m the same message from akismet after I log in to my site. Is enabling f url open a solution?

Enabling allow_url_fopen will have no effect; Akismet no longer uses that method.

robc: It’s possible that your problem was fixed by a change we made late Friday. Can you check again and let me know?

Hi Christopher,
Thanks for reply. If what I suggested is not correct could you please suggest what to do to make akismet working again and get rid of the error message?

Akismet has detected a problem. Some comments have not yet been checked for spam by Akismet. They have been temporarily held for moderation. Please check your Akismet configuration and contact your web host if problems persist.

Is there any way to find out more details about the error and real cause of the problem?

Same Problem here: Since I made the Update to WP3.9 Akismet is saying that Problem-stuff and it is not working properly.

Please fix it as I get a lot of spam at the moment ??

same thing here :/

I checked the comment history for a pending comment and the following error message was displayed:

4 hours ago – Akismet was unable to check this comment (response: Missing required field: blog.), will automatically retry again later.

Is there anything we can do on our end?

I also have the same error messages and the problem that all spam comments are in moderation que which is really overwhelming because all comments need to be deleted by hand.

If I go to my Akismet configuration page it is just empty and no settings can be set/changed.

Akismet stopped working since the last update a couple of days ago I believe.

Hope this can be solved soon. Please help us out.

onegaikaeru: Which version of WordPress are you running?

Hi Christopher,

I just updated to 3.9 because I thought it might have been incompatible with the older version – unfortunately the update did not help!

My website is onegai-kaeru[dot]com if that helps anything?
(And I am clueless when it comes to coding..)

Christopher Finke: I was the one working with Akismet support via email last Friday. I can verify that we identified at least one issue while working with Eoin.

So in my case it was the fact that the variable arg_separator.output in my PHP.ini setting was set to a non-default value of “&amp ;” (no spaces) and was being used by http_build_query to create the body of a post to Akismet servers.

At the time, I went ahead and set the value of arg_separator.output back to the PHP default of “&” and this resolved the issue. As I was able to register my API Key and Akismet once again began functioning. Even though I was told that a fix was in place that would allow the non-default value of “&” which I would prefer to use, as it has been that way for a long while on my system(s) and never caused an issue.

Unfortunately, the fix that was said to be put in place last Friday has not worked for me at all.

I verified this by resetting it to “&amp ;” (no spaces) yesterday evening, and this morning my users were once again complaining about all spam going into moderation and Akismet not functioning.

So in my opinion, the temporary solution is to conform to what Akismet appears to be expecting by changing back to the default value: arg_separator.output = “&”

My best guess is that they’ve missed an area that is still expecting the default ampersand and nothing more.

robc: I would wager that you are correct; I’ll review our code today to find where we’re still not handling non-standard arg separators so that the issue can be fixed for everyone.

Thanks for following up with this.

robc (and others): Give it another shot; I just pushed a change that I think should fix this problem without requiring you to modify your php.ini.

Christopher: I tried again and everything appears to be successful. I’ll update this thread if I find that it has failed at any time soon. Since reverting back to arg_separator.output = “&amp ;” (without spaces) all seems well for the last 4+ hours.

Thanks for your help with this. I’m glad we all seem to have resolved this.

Seems to work: no more unchecked Spam since yesterday. Thanks everybody for the quick solution!

Works on my site too. Thank you for quick resolution.