Akismet spam doubled in three days

  • I’ve seen the amount of spam caught by Akismet more than double in the past three days on many of the sites I manage. Akismet does seem to be working, but the number of moderated comments that are slipping through its net is getting really annoying. I’m seeing around 50 per day slip through Akismet on one site (but thousands more are being properly marked as spam).

    I’m using reducer to firewall spammy IPs – a technique that generally works really well – but the IPs are changing so rapidly that it’s affecting reducer’s effectiveness.

    Is anyone else seeing similar patterns?

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
  • Moderator Samuel Wood (Otto)

    (@otto42)

    www.ads-software.com Admin

    I have not had much spam make it to my site at all lately. I think a lot of it is getting stopped by the simple trackback validation plugin:
    https://www.ads-software.com/extend/plugins/simple-trackback-validation/

    Thread Starter shacker

    (@shacker)

    Well, I manage around 70 WP installations, so installing additional plugins on every blog is not an attractive option. I need server-wide solutions, not per-blog. Generally Akismet + 1-st time comment moderation is good enough, but this recent uptick is insane. It seems to have gotten a bit better yesterday, but numbers caught by Akismet continues to rise at a rate like I’ve never seen it.

    Thread Starter shacker

    (@shacker)

    Amazing – I’m now seeing 5x the normal volume of comments getting through Akismet.

    Hi there,

    Well I manage about 10 WP installs myself. I’ve had this issue before. It looks like your being targeted with a bot attack here and there are a couple ways to deal with it. If these are self hosted blogs (personal or company server) I would have to say a plugin is really the only way I’ve ever found to work. WP-SpamFree has done wonders for me, that anti-trackback is also a good tool. A server wide solution isn’t really possible besides a normal firewall (which really won’t help WP spam) only because a WP install needs its info right inside its own folder. So really you might have to bite the bullet and do individual plugins. But once they are installed you can always just autoupgrade them as time goes on.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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