Mixed results. Yours may vary

Sometimes, when you don’t see *everything* happening behind the scenes of an action, it’s an easy and quick assumption to think a particular part isn’t working, or that things could be working better, faster, more obviously. I am guilty of this in regard to Akismet – I didn’t see much action, so I assumed it either wasn’t working, or that my *insignificant* pages weren’t worthy of their time and that’s why I wasn’t seeing much in the way of ACTION-

Then I started being barraged with all sorts of spam attacks. I had been getting them consistently for a couple of weeks from the same persistent I.P.s – I KNEW I had a problem, I just figured no one else was noticing, so I reached out to Akismet to ask for additional help to monitor and stop the attacks.

Beyond the initial BOT generic response to my plea for assistance, I reached a human who took my concerns seriously, worked quickly to assure me the attacks were being seen, monitored, and that many *more* than I had realized had already been caught and stopped. They began at once to remedy the situation and through a few steps on my end, have quickly and abruptly ended the attacks from being a menace.

Persistence was key in this situation on my part. Knowing what to do and how to do it came from the experts at Akismet. In this instance, having no spam plugin would have been tantamount to suicide for my wordpress blog. Having a blog with spam protection built-in was so seamless, I had assumed it wasn’t really doing anything.

How wrong I was.