Can I turn off Aksimet, or view the spam it blocks?

Posted on by

Here’s the answer to a question that arises frequently on the support forum:

thesacredpath Member January 2nd, 2008 at 5:40 am @thesmallwave
Here are a few things about Akismet that may clear up some of your questions:

(1) Akismet cannot be deactivated nor is there any user configuration on wordpress.com blogs.

(2) Akismet will maintain comments it has caught for 15 days from the time they were received, and then it will delete the comment automatically. This is by design and cannot be changed. It is a good habit to check your spam comments every day or two so that you can identify legitimate comments and “despam” them prior to them being deleted by Akismet after the 15 days. Also, there is a delay between the number reported as caught going up and the spam appearing in your dashboard for you to display. The length of delay is typically only an hour or two, but if server loads are heavy, it may be up to a day.

(3) If multiple identical spam comments are sent to your blog, the duplicates will not show up in my spam list for you to review. Only one of the duplicates will be displayed.

(4) After you have verified that the above spam is indeed spam by deleting it and Akismet has learned, if you again get hit by the same source, your “spams caught” number will increase, but they will not be listed for you to review (since you have already identified them as spam).

(5) Any comment sent to you blog, that is already known by Akismet to be spam, will be blocked, your “spams caught” number will increase, but again, they will not be listed for you to review (since they have been previously identified as spam by yourself or others).

(6) If a legitimate comment is caught in your spam filter and you “despam” it, it may take up to a few days for your despaming to work its way through Akismet and if you get a comment from the same source in the meantime, it may still end up in the spam folder. If this happens, despam it again. Akismet will is a short period stop catching them.

N.B. The Akismet blog has a contact form.

Refer also to this August 2007 forum post

If clarification is required please contact staff.

Updated January 17th, 2008 Take note of this announcement

9 thoughts on “Can I turn off Aksimet, or view the spam it blocks?”

  1. Pingback: How to deal with spam effectively « one cool site:

  2. Koolness. THanks for clearing this up.
    I get loads of noobs trying to ping there blogs and ip’s :@

  6. OK, I was just wondering as i thought that it may be beneficial for the both of us.
    No probs though.

  9. Pingback: The 10 point case against CAPTCHA use « onecoolsitebloggingtips

Comments are closed.