I awoke this morning to a bit of a mess. After enjoying months of spam-free bliss thanks to Akismet, I found over a hundred spam comments for pills and free pictures to suit most any need or desire. Spam has snuck through before, but never in this volume, and Akismet has always been quick to learn from my manual corrections and stop further leaks.

Not this time.

So I began to panic. Had spammers figured out Akismet’s tricks (a)? Was there some problem with Akismet (b)? Had my license been terminated for over-use (c)?

I was surprised to see Matt Mullenweg’s quick response to my support inquiry. As it turned out, there was problem with the Akismet systems, and things should be back on track soon. I was relieved, and also impressed with the quality of the support. I’ve seen many companies and people struggle with customer support (and I struggle with how to support bsuite users), but Matt’s 82 word response was about perfect.

It’s (b), I’m very sorry.

There was a bug which caused Akismet to return extra data in its response which caused your plugin to ignore the response. Because all our systems were functioning correctly on the backend, just the response that was bad, our monitoring didn’t catch this problem.

I’ve taken steps to prevent this from happening in the future, of course. Everything should be working again correctly, please let me know if you have any more problems.

Related: here’s a library angle on customer support.

akismet, customer support, matt mullenweg, spam, support, user relations, user support

Posted August 27, 2006 by Casey Bisson
Categories: Politics & Controversy, Technology. Tags: akismet, customer support, matt mullenweg, spam, support, user relations, user support.

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