Akismet: how to stop false positives?

I’m actually really curious as to answer for this myself!
Have you gotten anywhere with this tamebay?
Or does anyone else have advice to offer?

The only place I’ve gotten is to have another commenter to whom it’s happening too.

The conclusion I’ve come to is that it must be possible to write my own plug in to do this, and also to utilise a PHP function to check that email addresses that people are leaving are real ones (I mean, actually check the domain rather than just check the formatting), and a couple of other comment-approval tweaks… so if I ever manage it, I’ll let you know!

This isn’t possible with the stock Akismet plug-in.

While Akismet is very well integrated into WP, it’s written to be the final arbiter of the comment. By that I mean it marks the comment as ‘spam’ after all of the other stock WP functions have run – including the whitelist.

If you look in akismet_auto_check_comment() you’ll see that if the web service returns true, it installs a pre_comment_approved filter that simply returns ‘spam’.

If you code, it should be very simple to either add a whitelist text control to Akismet and add a check of the comment against that or add a call to check_comment() (from /wp-includes/comment.php which will be loaded since it’s the thing that’s calling the plugin) and have that be a final savior of a comment from the spam bucket.

I like the check_comment() route because it approves tracebacks and pingbacks against your blogroll and approves comments from people with other approved comments.

If you want explicit control, the whitelist approach gives you that.

That I think hacking the Akismet plugin would be the cleanest way to do it vs writing another plug-in and trying to get it to work with Akismet.

JEff

Brilliant, Jeff, thank you – you’ve saved me hours of looking where to start with this one ??

That might fix the problem for your blog, but not all blogs. The best thing to do is mark yourself as “not spam” through the interface, and then drop a note to the contact form on the Akismet site:

https://akismet.com/contact/

Matt, I have already asked Akismet about this and had not one jot of a response from them.

And I don’t see how marking *myself* as “not spam” is going to help? I have now three frequent commenters who show up as “spam”. I ALWAYS mark them as “not spam” but when the next comment comes along, it gets marked as spam again. Hence I like the non-Akismet solution.

And I don’t see how marking *myself* as “not spam” is going to help?

Because marking it as “not spam” sends that fact back to Akismet, which is how it learns. It may take a while, but eventually it will figure it out.

If you’re getting marked as spam, then it’s likely that somebody else’s blog or blogs has marked your comments to them as spam in the past. This is how Akismet works, it’s mostly based on the actions of all the people that use it.

Because marking it as “not spam” sends that fact back to Akismet, which is how it learns. It may take a while, but eventually it will figure it out.

Yes, I know that – what confused me was being told to mark MYSELF as a not-spammer, when it’s not *me* that’s being marked as spam by Akismet. Sorry, I am being very stupid here obviously.

I guess you mean “mark the genuine commenters as not being spam”, which is what I’m doing – but every single time they comment again, they are AGAIN marked as spam. Hence my post.

I guess you mean “mark the genuine commenters as not being spam”, which is what I’m doing – but every single time they comment again, they are AGAIN marked as spam. Hence my post.

Akismet *will* learn. Nobody said it would learn quickly, however.

I am having the same problem. Akismet keeps tagging my own comments as spam on every single blog I go to. Even on my own blog! They don’t respond to any attempts to contact them. I have tried to have multiple people tag me as a nonspammer but nothing. This is ridiculous. It’s one of the most frustrating experiences I have ever had.

Commenters commenting under different names is what I find causes them to end being marked as spam on my site.

Akismet *will* learn. Nobody said it would learn quickly, however.

You’re more optimistic than I. I have a legit commenter whose comments have been captured by Akismet for over a yr & ea. time I mark them Not Spam. Akismet hasn’t learned in this particular case. I would say if it learns at all it learns VERY SLOWLY.

I’ve been having this problem for the past several weeks, finally went to the Akismet site yesterday and explained the problem in their comment form. Today, I received an email apologizing for the problem and saying that it’s fixed, and I’ve successfully added comments to other WP blogs now so everything seems to be okay.

There might have been problems with them responding in the past, but looks like that’s a better solution now than trying to train it indirectly.

I had a commenter who added his Yahoo URL to his comments & Akismet consistently threw him into spam. I even wrote to Akismet & asked them if they could remove this particular URL fr. the blacklist. They claimed they would but his next comment got filtered again.