is akismet broken?

Anyone else having issues with Akismet lately?  For about the past month or so (from a timeline perspective, I want to associate it to the release of WordPress 2.5+, but I don’t think I have any real evidence to do so) it’s been passing a pretty large amount of spam each day.  Prior to this recent behavior, I almost never had to worry about comment and/or trackback spam getting through Akisment and onto my frontpage.  Lately though, about three to ten pieces a day are slipping through Akismet’s filter.  Just take a look at today:

Yeah, all of those passed through Akismet’s filters and onto the blog proper (and that’s only all that would fit in the screenshot).  I always diligently report the spam mistakes back to the Akismet servers, so I was hoping maybe I’d be helping ID some new kind of spam technique and these would eventually dry up.  No luck so far though, still getting multiple pieces a day that make it through.

What’s up Akismet?


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3 Replies to “is akismet broken?”

  1. I haven’t noticed that many on mine, but now that I have said that it will start coming through. But I did notice that you’ve pulled your comments off the sidebar because of it. When it calms down are you putting them back up?

  2. Ack! At first I thought you must be trippin’ Mags… but then I check the page with IE instead of Firefox and you’re right – no comments on the sidebar! I changed to a new “recent comments” plugin not too long ago, and it must have busted the stylesheet in IE (works fine in FF tho). Off to debug!

    Edit: Found the problem and fixed it. Comments should be showing now in both IE and FF.

  3. This is a while after your post, but I’ve just started getting a huge amount of spam passing through my Akismet filter. Previously about 1 spam comment/week would reach my moderation queue. As of the last 24 hours I’ve had 68 spam comments get through. It’s almost as if Akismet has completely broken.

    Are you still seeing a lot of spam getting through?

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