Feature requests?

Is the same true for Conditional Captcha?

If WP-SpamShield also won’t be affected by that being enabled at the same time, then things would be golden… that plugin has an “Akismet Enhanced Mode” that is invaluable in keeping the size of the commentsmeta table reasonably sized (which is really the only reason I want to get rid of Akismet, it’s failure to clean up comment histories like the description says it will)

This plugin: http://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-conditional-captcha/

Alas, the problem isn’t using the captcha, it’s Akismet itself.

Since being introduced in Akismet v2.5, it has been storing “comment histories”, tracking what’s been marked as spam, what comments have been approved by admins or manually marked as spam by admins. Instructions also used to give admins the option to tell Akismet to clean up after itself after 30 days.

This option never worked, from Day One of it being implemented. I found this out the hard way when I tried moving one of my sites, and the commentsmeta table was 90Mb, while the comments table was a little more than 55Mb.

There is no solution for this problem, other than go into your database and manually run a couple of SQL calls to clean it out. You’ll see that table drop from 25Mb to 5k in an instant.

As as bonus, as of Akismet v3.0, they don’t even have the option for “clean up” listed anymore. So people who pay attention to these things need a better option to keep that bad Akismet behavior in check, and for me the WP Conditional Captcha plugin was doing the trick. In addition to providing captchas, it was removing comment histories on the fly 🙂

Doing a search on “akismet+commentmeta” yields some interesting commentaries and angry end users, both on the web and in the WP.org forums.

Although now I’m finding a plugin called WP Clean Up that may also do what I need… time to test that out!

Anyway, thanks for a wonderful spam plugin… I’m planning on a write up of my favorite plugins for 2014, and this one is at the top.

Yep, I reinstalled Conditional Captcha, and my total database size shrank down from 110Mb to 90Mb, comments table down to 21Mb and commentmeta back down to a reasonable 4Mb.

To be honest, this site has been an active WP site since late 2005 or early 2006, so almost 9 years of posts & comments can add up. WP Spamshield has only been on the site July or so (version 1.3.5), and it’s already blocked almost 100k spam comments.

So if you think about the millions of spam comments Akismet has handled over the years, with Akismet never cleaning up after itself like they’ve been promising it would since the day it was added with WP 2.5, you can see why so many people are disappointed that the WP people don’t fix that first instead of adding other bells and whistles that don’t improve performance as much as this one thing could.

Since they seem to work together, and I need Akismet to prevent spamming of my Gravity Forms on that site, together all three shall stay 🙂