Christopher Finke

I used legit data from past form submissions to populate my test submissions.

For example, this was the body of one submission marked as “not spam”:

Please share any other information about yourself that you would like us to know about you. (Limit 250 - 500 wordsPlease share any other PleasPlease share any other information about yourself that you would like us to know about you. (Limit 250 - 500 wordsPlease share any other information about yourself that you would like us to know about you. (Limit 250 - 500 wordsPlease share any other information about yourself that you would like us to know about you. (Limit 250 - 500 wordsPlease share any other information ab[...]

Another submission simply copied and pasted multiple copies of the questions from the form into the reply box. These are both typical spam responses — repetitive non-original content.

If you’d like to re-enable Akismet, submit the form using your own information and real responses (even if the actual information in them is made-up), and I can confirm whether or not it’s still being caught as spam.

I looked through our logs for your site this week, and there didn’t appear to be any legitimate submissions of that form. Everything was either obvious spam, or attempts to test the form with gibberish or placeholder data that were also marked as spam because of how similar they were to how bots would fill it out.

If you do still think that Akismet is marking real non-test submissions as spam, the best way for us to investigate it is for you to email us at [email protected] with some examples, and we’ll dig into it.

Can you email us at [email protected] with your API key or website URL so we can look at specifically why they’re being caught as spam? We should be able to address it pretty quickly through that medium.

Some contact forms need to be specially configured after installing Akismet. If you message us at [email protected], we can look into why it’s not working as you expected.

Akismet should function fine with all of those functions disabled (inasmuch as WordPress itself will continue to function).

Marking as resolved; if you’re still having issues, let us know.

I’m not sure I understand; these are all PHP functions that, if you have appropriate access, you can use in your scripts and plugins in whatever manner you choose. Akismet wouldn’t have anything to do with that.

Akismet does not create fake comments. The plugin source code is available and anyone is welcome to confirm that there is nothing in it that would do this.

It’s possible that you had the “Silently discard the worst and most pervasive spam so I never see it.” setting enabled; this catches the spam but doesn’t put it in your spam folder, which saves resources on your server and avoids possible exposure to the worst spam.

• This reply was modified 1 year, 1 month ago by Christopher Finke.

Yes.

The Akismet plugin only loads JavaScript and CSS that are shipped with the plugin, so self should be fine for those (specifically, the files in the _inc directory).

There is a stats iframe that loads from the domain tools.akismet.com, so if you want access to that, you should include frame-src https://tools.akismet.com/

Hello,

Can you email us at [email protected] with your website URL or API key so we can check the logs and see why this comments are getting caught? Thanks.

Noting that we’re now working through this over email; I’ll update this thread when it’s resolved.

Or if you prefer, you can email [email protected] if you’d rather keep working on this problem through email.

Which version of Contact Form 7 are you using? And do you have any special settings that would cause it to strip some HTML elements?

It appears that something is modifying the HTML that Akismet adds to contact forms; what other plugins are you running? If possible, you could try disabling them one by one to see if that temporarily fixes it, and if it does, let me know which one it was and I can look into what the conflict is.

If the problem persists with only Akismet and Contact Form 7 active, I’ll have to look into it more deeply.