Have you changed preferences on the plugin settings page?
The default behaviour is for comments that don’t pass the captcha to be left in the spam queue. Comments that pass are put in the moderation queue.
Thread Starter
Niels
(@zyne)
yes I did… I picked the option “Trash”
But I still get more than 50 spams per day, and nothing in the “Trash”
Do you have any other comment-related plugins installed? Can you post a link to your site?
Hi,
I am supporting a blog right now and ran into the same issue. Akismet was running for a while, and the owner opened up old articles for comments, which increased the monthly SPAM load from about 500 to 11000 and counting. I found your plugin and thought it is just what we need. I tested it manually, and it works, but as the OP said, the posts marked as spam show up in the moderation queue with a note “flagged as spam by Akismet”, even though I have configured it to trash the spam if the CAPTCHA is not solved correctly. The site is positiveparentingconnection.net. Any ideas? I can provide screen shots if that helps.No other comment-related plugins are installed.
UPDATE: Thanks for your test, just saw your test comment in the rash, where it was supposed to go. I think I found the error – in Settings/Discussion, there was a sitting to put any comment with 2 or more links into the moderation queue. Might this override the trash setting in your plugin? I turned it off now, waiting for the next SPAM bot to come by. Curiously, I wonder how the spam bots seem to get by reCAPTCHA.
madde, I have just posted a test comment on your site. Can you tell me where it ended up?
Hi Samir,
thanks for the quick reply. it did indeed go to the trash. I am wondering now how the actual spambots even get by reCAPTCHA. did they get that good?
It’s unlikely that they’re getting past recaptcha – most people using this plugin report that only 1 or 2 comments out of hundreds will pass the captcha (i.e., the rest are all spambots). If a large number is getting through, then something is wrong.
But unless we can reproduce the behaviour, it’s difficult to work out what the problem might be… If you do find a way to reproduce it then please let me know.
I will wait an hour to see if anything else gets through. Is there a way to turn on some logging for Conditional CAPTCHA?
There is a counter that tells you how many comments the plugin has rejected – look for it on the WordPress dashboard, at the bottom of the “Right Now” section.
I did think about tagging all comments that pass a captcha (in the same way that Akismet tags all comments that it flagged as spam), but decided not to in the interest of keeping things lightweight. I don’t want to clutter people’s databases.
Hm, problem is still there, just got a nice valium SPAM in the pending queue:
View post on imgur.com
Curiously, on the dashboard, it says:
86 spam comments have been automatically discarded by Conditional CAPTCHA.
So, it seems we are actually doing pretty well! Maybe the ones that get through are indeed posted by actual human beings?!
Sorry, nevermind, the 86 (now 87) were all the ones since yesterday that I manually cleaned out with the “check for spam” button. Just received a new one, again in the moderation queue, and the counter increased by 1 🙁
Problem SOLVED.
It was, of course, user error. The Hashcash plugin was reactivated by the owner, and it seems to take precedence – meaning if it finds a hashcash error, it puts a comment into moderation, regardless of what Akismet or Conditional CAPTCHA say. So, folks, turn off that Hashcash plugin and Conditional CAPTCHA works brilliantly! 🙂
Thanks for your help, Samir, I truly appreciate it.
Yes… funny things can happen when you have more than one anti-spam plugin active at the same time. Glad it’s working now.
