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1. rwl
   Member
   Posted 3 years ago #

   Just installed and activated Akismet. The Manage-->Akismet Spam says there are 290 spam comments, like this:

   You can delete all of the spam from your database with a single click. This operation cannot be undone, so you may wish to check to ensure that no legitimate comments got through first. Spam is automattically deleted after 15 days, so don’t sweat it. There are currently 290 comments identified as spam. [Delete all button]

   Last 15 days
   These are the latest comments identified as spam by Akismet. If you see any mistakes, simple mark the comment as "not spam" and Akismet will learn from the submission. If you wish to recover a comment from spam, simply select the comment, and click Not Spam. After 15 days we clean out the junk for you.

   Then it shows me 55 comments. And there's no apparent way to view the other 245. So how am I supposed to "check to ensure that no legitimate comments got through first"?

2. blogachover
   Member
   Posted 3 years ago #

   rwl, I found the query responsible in akismet.php. It contains this restriction: GROUP BY comment_author_IP. This means it only shows one spam from each IP address -- and the likelihood is just about 100% that if you got one spam from an IP address, everything from that IP is indeed spam.

   If you want to see this, find akismet.php in the wp-content/plugins/akismet directory, and add the following after line 266:

   <?if ($comment->ccount > 1)
   echo "(" . $comment->ccount . " comments)"; ?>

   Then, right after the "Not Spam" box, you'll see a number of comments whenever there are more than one from the same IP. Using this number, you'll see that what happened is akismet only showed you 55 comments because there were 245 comments from those same 55 IPs, all very likely to be spam.

3. adamh
   Member
   Posted 3 years ago #

   Good thread, i've also been wondering why this is. Blogachover says;

   the likelihood is just about 100% that if you got one spam from an IP address, everything from that IP is indeed spam

   But does it work both ways? If a legitimate comment is marked as spam, and that user (ie IP) has posted more than one comment, will marking the first comment as 'not spam' also mark the users' other comments?

4. evilzenscientist
   Member
   Posted 3 years ago #

   My blog is behind some hefty L4 switching and accelerators; effectively inbound posts look like they are from a set of four IP addresses.

   Is there a way to fix this problem?

5. adamh
   Member
   Posted 3 years ago #

   I guess you could change the akismet plugin to show all spam posts, not just one per IP address. Shouldn't be too difficult?

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