What happens if you click the “Check Network Status” button in the Server Connectivity section of the Akismet settings?
Well it sounds like what we know so far is that:
– Akismet claims their servers are available (by clicking the [“You can confirm that Akismet.com is up by”]”clicking here.” link in the Server Connectivity section of the Akismet settings page)
– Your ISP is claiming that they ran a traceroute it is something on akismet’s servers end.
What is the conclusion, that there is a 3rd party in-between the ISP and Akismet servers, that is causing a communication failure?
Where to go from here?
Can you ask your ISP what happens if they do ping command on the akismet server ip addresss? example:
ping 192.0.80.246
And tell us the results?
Can you suggest your ISP to add the “-I” switch to their traceroute command, like this example:
traceroute -I 192.0.80.246
And tell us the results?
The results of the ping and traceroute -I will tell even more detail of the network communication status.
My other concern is the other two akismet servers are still accessible — would they be able to provide you with the full Akismet service? I looked to answer this question but unfortunately I don’t know the answer. But in the meantime, have you looked at any of the individual spam messages that have been getting through your comment form, and , if so, have you been marking them as spam? ( My understand this could actually help akismet service get better )
Also, can you post your website url here? Per a “blackdog dot ie” post i googled, I wanted to try to do an mxtoolbox.com mx lookup, to check if your site was listed on an akismet blacklist (if such a list exists there) The idea being that if it is somehow found to be on a blacklist, then maybe to contact Akismet via their https://akismet.com/contact/ contact form. ( btw have you tried contacting akismet by that contact form already? )
