Title: axb21's Replies | WordPress.org

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# axb21

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## Forum Replies Created

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)

 *   Forum: [Fixing WordPress](https://wordpress.org/support/forum/how-to-and-troubleshooting/)
   
   In reply to: [API key not working in akismet](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/api-key-not-working-in-akismet/)
 *  Thread Starter [axb21](https://wordpress.org/support/users/axb21/)
 * (@axb21)
 * [19 years, 5 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/api-key-not-working-in-akismet/#post-490142)
 * Well, this problem continues to perplex me, but I have a workaround. Unfortunately,
   though it works for now I don’t know why this workaround is needed. I thought
   I’d detail what I tried and saw in case it helps someone else who is experiencing
   a similar issue.
 * On the suggestion of a helpful individual with wordpress support, I obtained 
   the debug version of akismet. That keeps a log in /tmp/akismet.log. I edited 
   the akismet.php file to log more detail than it was giving by default, and eventually
   found that akismet was having trouble connecting to the akismet servers after
   all. I was getting errno 11, “Resource temporarily unavailable” from the call
   to fsockopen. Increasing or decreasing the timeout length didn’t help.
 * This made no sense to me because I tried a bunch of different ways of connecting
   to the akismet servers from the command line, and they all worked fine (lynx 
   and telnet, for instance). nslookup had no problems looking up the IP addresses
   of these domains. But it looked like the call to fsockopen was timing out.
 * On a whim, I changed the fsockopen call in akismet.php, hardcoding the IP address
   of the server where the API key validation is done. Poof, the key validation 
   suddenly worked fine. Then I put an entry for that server in /etc/hosts and changed
   the PHP file back to how it was originally, and that worked too. There is a second
   server akismet contacts (I suppose to get/send data about spam) which I also 
   hardcoded into /etc/hosts. For the past day and a half or so all functions of
   the plugin are working fine.
 * This is obviously unsatisfactory because those IP addresses may change. But it
   works for now.
 * I find it bizarre. I don’t understand what fsockopen is doing under the hood 
   well enough to guess why it would successfully look up a domain name from /etc/
   hosts but fail to from DNS (I verified the nobody user has permission to do DNS
   lookups).
 * I saw a bug report for PHP 4.3 (which is what I’m stuck with, unfortunately) 
   stating that fsockopen does not distinguish DNS lookup errors from other kinds
   of connection errors. So it seems like I’m not going to be able to get more detail
   about what’s going wrong without working hard…
 * In any event, it looks to me like wordpress is doing what it should be doing,
   so I’ll take this up with akismet. I think my problem is probably related to 
   some issue on my server, maybe with this older version of PHP. Thanks to everyone
   who offered suggestions, I appreciate the help.
 * Anthony
 *   Forum: [Fixing WordPress](https://wordpress.org/support/forum/how-to-and-troubleshooting/)
   
   In reply to: [API key not working in akismet](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/api-key-not-working-in-akismet/)
 *  Thread Starter [axb21](https://wordpress.org/support/users/axb21/)
 * (@axb21)
 * [19 years, 5 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/api-key-not-working-in-akismet/#post-489856)
 * Thanks for the info. It remains to be seen if that’s my answer. I control the
   server hosting my blog, and I know outgoing traffic is not blocked. So if you’re
   right then this 24-48 hour ‘waiting period’ is the only thing it could be. At
   least I can try being patient for a day or two.
 * As for searching, I did that, but the thread you pointed out didn’t come up. 
   Call me dopey, but none of the search terms I used caught that post (or maybe
   they did and I was too lazy to check back in time that far, who knows). It seems
   to me that wordpress.com ought to alert new users of this ‘waiting period’ at
   time of signup. Because a lot of people are going to do exactly what I did: sign
   up on wordpress.com to get an API key to activate akismet, only to find that 
   the key doesn’t work right away. So I think I’ll contact someone at wordpress.
   com with this question, see if there really is such a waiting period, and suggest
   that they alert new users that they might have to wait 24-48 hours to use their
   new key. Honestly I’m still skeptical of that, as it doesn’t make sense to me
   that you should have to wait — I verified my account via the email mechanism,
   so what’s being achieved by waiting longer?
 * Thanks again,
 * Anthony

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)