Kevin's Weblog

The switch to feedback allowed me to easily close comments on articles after a couple months. This is the single most effective anti-spam measure I’ve tried. Before this change, I was getting about 300 spam comments a day, with Akismet achieving 98-99% effectiveness. This was leaving me with a handful of spams that I had to clean up manually each day.

With feedback preemptively rejecting any comment submissions on old posts, I now only get 1-2 spams a day that are submitted to Akismet, and it has caught all of them so far.

As an aside, this seems to suggest a shortcoming in Akismet’s learning algorithms. The Akismet query API includes the article permalink, and almost all of my spam was on 3 or 4 articles. Since I was submitting feedback to Akismet on each of the spams it missed, it really should have learned that comments on those articles were spam with extremely high probability. On the contrary, though, I never observed a decline in the false negative rate on those articles.