It has come to my attention that the WordPress spam filter, Akismet, has been a little queer since… well, since August last year apparently, according to a number of WordPress forum threads.
I’ve been receiving a ton of spam message notifications, but Akismet has not been keeping them for moderation. I have a rather sinking feeling that a number of valid comments being made by readers may have been labeled as spam and promptly eradicated. And, unfortunately, there’s not way for me to turn it off: being on the cheap-seats option of WordPress means it filters all of my posts regardless of whether I want it to or not.
If you have posted comments in the past, and feel slated that they haven’t appeared on the blog, please don’t think I’m rude – it’s more than likely that I just didn’t get it.
For now, if you want to comment, feel free to email me; I’d like to hear from you if you’ve enjoyed a certain post or you have something to add or even to tell me how lame I am. I’ll try to come up with some solution in the meantime.
Really? I imagine it happens once in a while, but I stopped checking for false positives after going through several thousand spams and not finding any valid comments in there. Maybe I should monitor it again.
Perhaps I’m suffering from illusions of grandeur – I heard it’s a common human affliction. XD
In all honesty, I don’t think I’m getting that many comments. But reading through some of the stories from users on the forum, I would like to be able to see the spam/messages getting filtered, if only to assure myself that Akismet is doing its job.
I forgot that you are on wordpress.com and not self hosted, so don’t know if there are differences. You can’t see which ones are marked as spam? Interesting.
I think you need to uncheck Admin->Plugins->Akismet Configuration->”Automatically discard spam comments on posts older than a month.”
Hope it helps