I recently installed WordPress 2.5 and among the changes I noticed was a loss of Akismet’s “Recheck Spam” button (or something like that. It didn’t seem like such a problem at the time, but then I got swamped with so much trackback and comment spam that the flood DOS‘d my server. I had to disable comments and trackbacks for a time, which brought my server back, but my moderation queue still had over 500 comments waiting for me. Most of those are spam, but I like to think there are a couple real comments among them.

And that’s when I really wondered where Akismet’s “Recheck Queue for Spam” button went.

I looked inside the code and found the appropriate functions there. In fact, it even includes a WP2.5 specific function, akismet_check_for_spam_button(). I’m not exactly sure why the button doesn’t appear, but at least all the code is still there to do the work, and all I have to do is manually check the URL:

edit-comments.php?page=akismet-admin&recheckqueue=true&noheader=true

And after running that a few times (it timed out a few times), my moderation queue went from over 500 to under 100. That’s something I can manage.

It’s worth noting, however, that all a person really has to do is update the darn Aksimet plugin. Reminder to self: It installs with the rest of WP with SVN, but I it doesn’t update with the rest of WP. A quick svn up inside the directory, however, is all it takes.

The Viagra and Cialis knock-offs being pushed in so much of the spam I get may be directed at things the recipients feel very personally about, but the message itself has never been personal. Well, it had never seemed personal to me, anyway, until now.

Clay Shirky pointed out what I’ve started to see, and wonder about, myself: many of the subject lines in the spam I’ve received recently sound familiar, and plausible as a real message. So plausible, in fact, that my spam filters can’t trap it — even I can’t spot it — until after I’ve read it. Some of the subject lines that surprised him as spam?

• Subject: definition of what “free software” means. Outgrowing its
• Subject: What makes it particularly interesting to private users is that there has been much activity to bring free UNIXoid operating systems to the PC,
• Subject: and so have been long-haul links using public telephone lines. A rapidly growing conglomerate of world-wide networks has, however, made joining the globa

Here’s what he had to say about it:

Can it be that spammers are starting to associate context with individual email addresses, in an effort to evade Bayesian filters? (If you wanted to make sure a message got to my inbox, references to free software, open source, and telecom networks would be a pretty good way to do it. I mean, what are the chances?) Some of this stuff is so close to my interests that I thought I’d written some of the subject lines and was receiving this as a reply. Or is this just general Bayes-busting that happens to overlap with my interests?

If it’s the former, then Teilhard de Chardin is laughing it up in some odd corner of the noosphere, as our public expressions are being reflected back to us as a come-on. History repeats itself, first as self-expression, then as ad copy…

And all of this has me thinking about two things.

First, despite the SEC crackdown on stock spam (and even a lawsuit in 2006), market-related spam probably isn’t going away, in part because the nature of the market makes it easy for spammers to profit.

“All products for your health” spams require that somewhere, somehow the spammer collect money from the stooge, but stock spams wash that money through the market. Sure, statistical evaluation might reveal the spammers, but how many?

A possible explanation Shirky didn’t discuss is how spammers might be applying tracking and statistical tools to profile us. Who knows how many messages get trapped, but if the spammers track those few that get through — including the claimed sender, subject, and other text — then what’s to stop them from exploiting that hole in our filters? How many such messages would have to sneak through before spammers got a pretty good profile of us and our filters?

Update, here’s one that arrived just now:

• What’s Google up to 1st of April This Year?

personalization, personal, cialis, profiling, spam, spam filtering, spam filters, this stock is going to explode, viagra

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

I’ve been getting spam, a lot of spam; 3400 spam comments and trackbacks in the last two months or so. So it was a relief to find Akismet, a networked spam blocking plugin for WordPress. They claim to have blocked 318,825 spams since its release, and I’ve been pretty happy with it.

tags: akismet, comment spam, wordpress, spam, spam a lot, spam blocking, spams, trackback spam

John Martin was kind enough to lead a session on spam management Tuesday (November 8th). Here was the description:

Spam is annoying and often offensive, but it’s a fact of life for all of us. John Martin will lead a discussion about how we can limit the amount of spam we see using tools running on our campus mail server and in Outlook. He’ll also discuss what we can do to keep our email addresses out of spam lists in the first place and spam related issues such as phishing.

His notes are online at his new Wordpress.com blog: EdVentures in Technology.
battle against spam, email addresses, john martin, junk mail, outlook, phishing, plymouth state university, psu, spam, spam management, spam management tools, tech tuesdays, tools, war against spam

Some time ago, a box with the above pictured contents went to Chuck Robidoux. He wrote back:

Nothing starts a Monday off like Kippered Seafood Snacks and Deviled Ham with a side of Spam and Potted Meat Food Product followed by Vienna Sausage, all washed down with some icey cold Clam Juice.

Now I am ready to face the day.

Yours Meatily,
Dr. Meaty McMeat Meatofski Meatovich Hamkowsky-Beafeau Porkson

The Canned slide show. More photos from MaisonBisson.

Yes, this has already been covered, but now we got art!

spam, canned, canned meat, meat, vienna sausages, deviled ham, potted meat