Mind Tree Are you banned by Akismet for spaming?
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You must have experienced that you try to post comments on your friends blog but your comment never appears. This happens because you are banned by Akismet. Akismet system has been protecting WordPress bloggers for a while now from comment and trackback spammers.
Akismet system relies heavily upon blog owners marking your comments/trackbacks as spam and reporting them back to Akismet as such via the WordPress plugin. This means that many innocent bloggers are “false positives” in the Akismet system due to either malicious or ignorant behavior on the part of other bloggers.
I faced the same problem and went to akismet contact page to file my request, its been weeks and i haven’t received words back from them. Notice that they are using Math question on their contact form. Moreover, i have encountered scripts which can solve the math question in order to post spam messages.
There is a huge number of bloggers who are marked incorrectly as ’spammers’ by people who don’t like them for one reason or another or who’re simply ignorant and incorrectly marking any and all trackbacks as spam.
How Spammers can play with Akismet system and get you banned?
Lets take an example of a blogger who wrote a harsh comment on other blogger’s website. Now the other blogger will take his identity (username, email and URL) and put them into a spam script (believe me there are plenty out there) and he will set the script to send out 100’s of comments/trackbacks to other blogs. Of course, most of these blog owners who got the ’spam’ would flag these comments as spam. This would result in your credentials being incorrectly marked as spam comments by hundreds of bloggers, thus ruining your expertise to promote your site.
What is surprising here that Akismet doesn’t do IP tracking. It seems that they could figure out that there were 10000 spammy comments from one IP address and 150 legitimate comments from another address. But, apparently, they don’t do this. What does it cost them in order to follow the above isn’t clear to me and many people are waiting until they change their logic to flag ID’s as SPAM, to me it looks like clear negligence. What about those who are falsely got banned because of some reason?
Million dollar Question is how to get unbanned from Amismet?
Well, there are two ways that can get your id unbanned by Akismet:
- You can contact Akismet and ask them to un-ban your status
- Ask those bloggers who have flagged you as Spam to change your status back to “Not Spam”.
What do you think? will that be easy, well i don’t think so.
Suggestions for Akismet
Akismet apparently relying too much on automated systems and this leaves the whole process open to exploitation by malicious individuals. Furthermore, they seem to place a lot of weight on just a few reports which could be simply ignorance of how trackbacks work or perhaps someone reacting out of anger to a negative comment.
Lastly, they need to make it crystal clear how to get your credentials cleared after being given a false positive status in the system. Having an anti-spam system for blogs is important. However, having an anti-spam system that can’t be easily gamed or that gives credibility where credibility isn’t due is also important. Akismet needs to step up and correct these serious and growing problems in their system.
What you can do to avoid all this and enjoy your posting the way you were doing earlier?
Well, I have used Disqus comments plugin for wordpress which takes commenting to next level. It automatically checks for spam but you will have option to approve any spam which you think isn’t a Spam. Moreover, you can track conversations with video comment option. You can build a community using that plugin on your website. Use it unless Akismet works out for you.
Ask your friends to flag your comments as “Not Spam” if they aren’t using Disqus plugin.
Have you been the victim of an Akismet false positive? Have you gotten a lot of Akismet false positives in your filter? Leave me a comment and let me hear your opinion. If you’ve got any thoughts, comments or suggestions for things we could add, leave a comment! Also please Subscribe to our RSS for latest tips, tricks and examples on cutting edge stuff.
