Askimet Comment Issues

On Monday, January 1, 2007, there was some kind of problem that classified any comment I made on a WordPress blog (Techcrunch, Scoble, my own blog – David Dalka – Chicago GSB, etc) as spam. Yikes!

The problem seems to be fixed as of this morning but it’s disturbing to me as it’s obviously happened to others before and the process to fix it is not transparent. I don’t know whether it was my name, e-mail or domain that was a problem, the IP address didn’t appear to be the problem as I used an Internet connection on another ISP and got the same result.

Last week, this issue caused Danny Sullivan to post this regarding a conversation with Blake Ross:

“For some balance, below is the comment I added to Blake’s post. Akismet seems to have eaten it initially, as it routinely does to my comments on blog that use that system to catch comment spam [I commented about this here. Can’t see it? Ironically, it was probably eaten].”

If people like Danny Sullivan and myself are having significant trouble with this problem, imagine the frustration of the average blogger, who likely has no clue what Askimet even is let alone the organizations involved. The post by Matt Mullenweg seems to be a cop out(I hope this is not the case). False positives in any number regarding spam are simply unacceptable. They can cause frustration as a poster, they can cause also serious damage to your reputation if people wrongly think you are deleting their posts. This is an unacceptable state.

Is WordPress listening to what customers want? I don’t know and will take a wait and see attitude. So let’s wait a month and see if this problem still exists before drawing any conclusions.