Akismet banning people for nothing?

by Sapphire (November 8, 2006)

45n5 seems to have been banned from some centralized list Akismet uses for identifying spam. How did he get on the list? Well, it seems someone reported him for spamming. Why? None of the bloggers whose sites have recently blocked his comments seem to feel there was a good reason. Several of them have manually un-blocked his comments.

So, if you don’t like a competitor, just get him to comment on your blog, and mark his comment as spam in your Akismet.

I’ve never used Akismet. Spam Karma gives me a lot of control over whether I let it use centralized lists, or just take my chances. Actually, it gives me a lot of control over a lot of things, and has only blocked 3-5 good comments out of the several thousand my various blogs have received since I started using it. Unfortunately, Akismet is the only option available for BBpress right now, so I’ll be watching it carefully for unfair blockings.

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4 Responses to “Akismet banning people for nothing?”

  1. Empress said:

    November 8th, 2006 at 10:36 am

    I use aksimet… and to be totally honest I don’t even know where to go to change all the settings on it. 45n5’s address seems to get caught in the filters - not sure it’s the domain - too short… too many numbers to it. I’m not sure - if someone banned him (on purpose or not and then got stuck on the list).

    But it sure made me wonder how many other legitimate comments were getting stuck in the spam filter that I don’t go to all that often to check… because there are just so many to wade through. But I’m doing it more often now - because of that problem with 45n5’s address.

    I think this sort of thing happens more often than we think - I mean if one were really wanting to get rid of competition (in blog comments or on the ‘Net) - how easy would it be to call them spam and get them blacklisted?

  2. Lloyd Budd said:

    November 8th, 2006 at 3:27 pm

    How easy? Probably a lot harder than you think.

    Akismet has heuristics to protect against that, but it does not stop people from trying, and trying, and …

    I suggest reporting the details of your issue at http://akismet.com/contact/

  3. 45n5 said:

    November 10th, 2006 at 11:16 am

    “Probably a lot harder than you think.”

    In my case it was pretty easy ;-)

    Thanks for the link!

  4. Pozycjonowanie said:

    December 9th, 2006 at 8:07 am

    Someone else below asked this already.
    I am getting nailed with Spam in my website for our blog website. Is there anyway to stop this? If not, there really isn’t any point in leaving it up and active. Any help will be greatly appreciated. http://www.profesjonalna-reklama.pl

    Thanks Keep up the good work. Greetings from Poland