Akismet Spam Filter for WordPress - The Banning of the Innocent Commenter
Both in Western Mythology and Islam we find explanations of the concept of Kismet.
THE TRIUMPH OF THE MOIRAI
However, as is true so often with men, the explanations given are different in each case.
In mythology, the Super-Goddesses of Fate (or Kismet), known as the Moirai, were feared by both men and Blue Collar Gods alike. At the moment of birth, the Moirai, in famously arbitrary fashion, assigned innocent newborns to futures of glory or tragedy, success or failure, riches or penury, physical health or perpetual pain. Once judged by the Moirai to be worthy of malice, there was no recourse. In effect, the Super Goddesses had spoken.
Within Islam, however, the principle of Kismet, as explained by the vast majority of the followers of Mohammad, is the will of a wise and just God, a God to be trusted as a consequence of the love he has for his creatures.
The reason I am taking time to review the meanings of the term Kismet is because of a phenomenon that has surfaced in the world of WordPress*, one recognized by many, including WordPress users, as dangerous and patently unfair to innocents; one that behaves very much like the Kismet of mythology rather than the Kismet of Islam. [*WordPress is the most widespread blog software, with over 200 million websites running on the platform, according to Wikipedia. -Ed]
I am referring to Akismet, the super goddess of spam filters; the plug-in that relegates innocents to a life of electronic trash bins, ignored and/or blocked from participation in the mainstream WordPress community, and does so because it can.
For the purpose of this short piece, I wish to make very clear that spam filters, used properly, and with safeguards relative to the civil rights of non-spammers, not to mention the common courtesy due to new visitors to blogs, are valuable tools.
In addition, it is my confirmed opinion, that it is the right of any blogger to personally deprive voice on their virtual space for any reason.
Just as we are all free to hang the phone up and cease listening to another person's point of view, and to be as rude as we wish, even to a soon to be ex-supervisor or friend, so too are we free, and should continue to be free, to deprive anyone of the right to disagree with us in our own electronic homes, our virtual electronic houses.
That said, the trouble starts when centrally controlled spam filters, unannounced and unbeknownst to the filter users begin banning individuals and businesses system-wide as a result of the anonymous vote of a small number of filter users.
Akismet, a widely used WordPress spam filter, has been alarmingly guilty of silencing minority voices, not because of spamming violations, which after all is the point of such an application, but rather because those banned were attempting to expand discussion on blogs to include poorly represented points of view.
It would seem to me that blog owners would welcome varied inputs when they introduce topics, so long as the inputs were respectful and intelligent, but such is evidently not the case. (Billy Rose, the band leader, once said "There is only one thing worse than bad publicity, and that's no publicity at all.") However, again, if a blogger wants nothing but "at-a-boys" on his or her personal blog, so be it. I say have at it, and have fun.
Of course, I believe it is rather shoddy of a blogger to invite opinion and then ban an individual for disagreeing with the thrust of the article, but that is the bloggers' right. And, I am sadly straying again from the principal point of this article. So, without further venturing afield, let us return to the subject at hand.
What I am objecting to is the delegation of the power to a handful of anonymous persons to deprive access to blogging platforms, especially to those who have done nothing to merit such exclusion. Banning by anonymous vote from the crowd smacks of the same spirit that was (and to some extent still is) alive and well within organizations founded to "deal" with those who represent other ideas, other races, other political and/or religious views.
With that, let's look at Akismet in as much detail as is available to the public.
Several persons of my acquaintance have been banned from participating on thousands, if not millions, of WordPress sites by Akismet. Among them, I have not found a legitimate spammer, that is, someone expressing views that are vulgar or in some other way in opposition to a general sense of community decency. Nor have the banned used machine generated mechanisms to attempt to secure for the individual an advantage of some kind, the product of a feverishly link-avaricious mind. No, these are ordinary folks just visiting blogs and honestly attempting to share their points of view with others.
Akismet has banned them for this practice in absolute fashion, even more effectively than the Moirai of old were able in their world.
Having contacted Akismet Support (AS) in order to remedy what seemed to them blatant violations of civility, not to say statute, at minimum AS was grumpy when they chose to respond to the inquiries at all. The most common response to a report of improper banning was a simple, "We are just doing what the bloggers want." So says Alex Shiels and Matt Mullenweg.
Akismet Plugin: A Virtual Firing Squad
Let's see what actually is happening.
Lack of User Involvement
To a person, the folks my acquaintances have contacted relative to how their spam filter is behaving, champion Akismet, even though, when questioned further, it becomes embarrassingly obvious that the users have no idea how or why persons attempting to comment on their blogs are being trashed without recourse, sent along with pornography and other easy greasy targets to dwell in the outer darkness of their spam folders, or, worse, blocked totally, that is, deprived of the ability to participate at all on their site.
Attacking the Defenseless
Donning white sheets, for anonymity's sake, has, of course, become a hopeless cliche in the United States. However, it is still a useful reference here. Today, instead of the white sheets, Akismet uses what are called "white pages."
The way of the white page is interesting. By simply using a different algorithm, Akismet can escalate the shunning of undesirables. This would be the equivalent of stomping on the toe of one of the Moirai after finding out they had condemned one to a life of losing at cribbage.
After an Akismet banned individual's or business' comment has been written on the Akismet "protected" site, and the Enter Key pressed, a blank white page appears. Access denied. Why? Because Akismet can. It's all done clinically. "We are just doing what the bloggers want."
One can easily imagine the surprise it is for a non-spammer to discover that he or she has been excluded from near universal participation on WordPress platforms which in turn use the public airways, satellites, and ground lines.
Personal Philosophies of the Powerful Powerless
There are some personalities who use the anonymity of the Internet to press back or compensate for their otherwise powerless personal lives.
This is the same sort of person who will use his or her automobile to horn blast octogenarians too slowly exiting off ramps, or the middle digit to express multi-faceted opinions to the occupants of church buses.
Such personally bankrupt individuals are more than happy to "snitch" to Akismet, basking in the power they have been granted to exclude. After all, Akismet is, "Just doing what such bloggers want." A small number of these complainants, most having gone off their meds, is sufficient for Akismet to ban for all eternity those who dare to darken their virtual doorstep.
Illegal, Unethical, Unfriendly
Of course, the kind of anonymous banning of the innocent is really the same kind of error we in the US have been attempting to correct for the past sixty years while others have been making the same run at fairness for all of recorded history. That is, we have been trying hard to prevent an unwell minority of persons being able to disadvantage a healthy majority. So far, Akismet has gotten away with turning back the clock in the US and elsewhere.
Akismet has been reported on several occasions to the American Civil Liberties Union. What, if anything, is happening at that level, I have no idea.
However, legality aside, this is an appeal to the good hearts in WordPress land.
Do you really want a spam filter with this kind of non-existent sense of community being responsible for making judgments in your name? Can you abide an organization such as this to decide who will be welcomed or condemned in your personal virtual house?
~Guest Contributor J. Powers
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05/10/2010 
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I sympathize with your college but you do not clearly understand this issue (in spite of the great amount of time I have spent trying to explain it to your Dr. Ann).
Akismet does NOT delete your comments. In my blogs and those I manage for others I rescue every single valid comment I receive. You are NOT banned. Akismet is a necessary evil to deal with spammers.
All bloggers MUST moderate their comments. If I did not use Akismet every post in my blog would be full of offensive language and links to sites that I would never visit on subjects that I do not believe are appropriate for mixed company. I can simply not allow that. Akismet automatically blocks and I then manually delete 150+ of these offensive comments every single day.
What do you and Dr. Ann hope to accomplish with your continued campaign against Akismet and WordPress blogs? We are NOT going to stop using WordPress and to not use Akismet is FAR WORSE than to use it.
I guarantee you that if I did not use Akismet that EVERY SINGLE COMMENT in my blogs would have to be approved before it could appear and then you would probably think you really were banned or censored.
Akismet is NOT evil. You are NOT banned. You are NOT being censored. Yes, some bloggers may not be wise enough to rescue your comments from the spam section and I do my best to educate them that we DO need to review and rescue real comments from spam.
A better solution for you would be to use the contact forms that wise bloggers provide to let them know you left a comment and ask them to see if it might have ended up in spam so they can approve it. That works even in blogs owned and managed by bloggers who don't routinely review their spam folders.
P.S. If you provide me with your desired anchor text and appropriate landing page I will add a link for your scholarship sponsor and you can do that yourself using the http://GrowMap.com/keyword KeywordLuv plugin installed in all the WordPress blogs I manage. I guarantee you that I WILL find and approve your comments provided they are relevant to the post where you leave them.
P.P.S. I have an even better idea for you. Register all your sites at CommentLuv and if you use the optional default links you can create http://comluv.com/news/anchor-text-links/ anchor text links for your comments in all 20,000+ and growing CommentLuv enabled blogs. There is a small annual charge for registering them but by having your links registered in CommentLuv instead of typing them into comments your comments are far less likely to end up in the spam folder because Akismet often flags comments that include links or domain.com in them.
Gail from GrowMap 
05/25/2010
Interesting article on the origin of the name Akismet. I love to study the origin of words and traditions which is why we don't celebrate Christmas or Easter (both pagan origins). I use Akismet because it was the only thing I could find to stop the endless stream of fake comments to my site. I was tired of checking my e-mail only to find hundreds of fake comments every day. Yes, HUNDREDS!! These were comments that were nothing more than symbols and it was driving me nuts! I welcome all real comments, and have never had anyone on any social networking sites tell me that their comments weren't getting through. Until I can find a better solution, I'm sure people understand that I'm only trying to stop the fake comments, not real people!! I notice that you're comments are pre-moderated. Does that mean that you are also trying to limit what your visitors are or aren't allowed to share on your site?
Andrea 05/27/2010
This is partly a response to Gail. You say Akismet does not delete your comments: I beg to differ. I've had my comments stopped right at the door before the respective blog's moderator has had a chance to decide whether it's a legitimate comment or not.
Gail further says that "bloggers MUST moderate their comments". I couldn't agree more. But the problem here is that in some cases bloggers don't even get to see the comments in the first place. Whenever I make a comment and use my URL in the provided slot, the comment goes blank as soon as I hit the Submit (or Send or whatever) button.
What's interesting is that this problem started about the time I left a comment on a site that was using one of my articles without my consent or approval and without giving me my rightful credit. I left the comment about this theft of my intellectual property because the site owner had phone number as one of the "required fields" on his contact page/form. I had no interest in giving an article thief my phone number.
Now, if a site owner wants to block me from making future comments on his site, it is totally within her/his right. After all, it is his "virtual electronic house" as J. Powers asserts in the article above (by the way, great job, Powers). But it is not for Akismet to virtually silence my voice and thousands if not millions of others in the name of fighting spam. Let me use an example:
If your site were banned by a social bookmarking site, say, Digg, would Digg disallow you from using other social bookmarking sites such as Stumble Upon, Delicious, Mixx etc.? I am sure they would not. Digg has a notoriety of banning users from their site (just search the term 'banned from Digg' using your favorite search engine). And Digg has every right to ban you from using their site, since it is their property, and they don't have to have a legitimate reason.
Apparently Akismet can ban you from the world, at least the Wordpress world (of those using their famous plug-in). Since when did Akismet become the policeman of the Wordpress world? Is this arrogance or what.
My other question is, why does Wordpress allow this to continue?
David Kamau 05/27/2010
I have returned to apologize to Dr. Ann, Beth, Bailey, Andrea and anyone else who first recognized that Akismet was deleting their comments. I did many tests and each time I found their comments and other test comments I made were in my SPAM folders in multiple blogs.
Yesterday was the first time I saw the issue that they were describing. A comment I wrote for one of my blogs in another of my blogs simply vanished. I waited 48 hours to be sure and it never appeared. I have since been sent to an Akismet Test page and was able to confirm that Akismet is indeed censoring comments based on specific URLs, information in the name field and probably words in the body of posts.
I already knew that comments with links in them were being sent to either moderation or spam. Now I believe links that are banned by Akismet will also make comments disappear.
When I exchanged emails with Dr. Ann and others about this problem they never shared that test URL with me and I was never able to reproduce the problem of comments not ending up at least in SPAM. Now that I can I state unequivocally that this is totally unacceptable.
I am writing a post about this issue right now and I guarantee it WILL get widespread visibility. As soon as it is live (soon) you can read about it here and help me in spreading the word.
Akismet must at least let bloggers opt out of having their commentators comments censored or change this policy altogether. If they do not and we can not find another spam solution then bloggers will be forced to pre-moderate all their comments.
I would rather manually moderate the hundreds of spam I receive daily than have my readers unable to leave real comments.
Gail Gardner from GrowMap 06/06/2010
I have had this happen to me. I don't know how people justify this so called spam filter. What it is is putting power in the hands of people who don't know how to use it. It's all anonymous. People don't like spam, so in order not to have to deal with spam, they opt for a program that might as well be run by the Nazis.
Say anything of which Akismet doesn't approve, anything at all, on any subject, and you'll find yourself banned from a couple thousand sites overnight.
And, guess what, if you complain about it, you're banned forever from telling the people who use Akismet that their spam filter is actually equivalent to silencing potential friends, business, etc.
Bottom line: Akismet is combating one evil, spam, with something a lot more dangerous, outright censorship. Akismet is even more of a censor in my experience than the Chinese military.
I don't know how to combat Akismet because those who use it seem delighted. Either they are unaware of what Akismet does to visitors or they don't care that they are treating perfectly innnocent visitors to their site very badly. (And, for those who want to build a following for any reason, you might as well kiss that idea goodbye. With Akismet, a blog quickly gets the reputation for being anti-business, and anti-people.)
They, the users of Akismet, wouldn't dream of being as rude to people as Akismet is on a personal level in their name.
I suppose there are those who don't care about American values relative to free speech. So long as they are not inconvenienced, Akismet can do whatever it does, and they will defend the program. I've been able to find a couple of e-mails of blog owners, and contacted them. They are always surprised that their blog is blocking messages that could have meant money to them. But, bottom line for them, they really don't care how rude or what messages are being blocked. Since they've installed Akismet everything is peachy. They have noticed a drop in e-mail across the board, including business contacts that used to be active on their site, but that must be a coincidence, they think. How dare I suggest that Akismet is a bad apple.
They tell me that Akismet couldn't be as bad as all that. Well, let me tell you from personal experience, it's WORSE than all that. I just hope that Alex Shiel and Matt Mullenweg, the brains behind Akismet, never get in the position of a Gestapo commander. They would be brutal.
Jeff Parnell 06/07/2010
Considering that today my blog was attacked by two visitors to Gail's blog, who in my opinion wrote "spam" comments on my blog because what they had to say had nothing to do with the topic, and now I see where the genesis of it came from.
People believe that they have the right to say anything they want to say wherever they say it. My issue with Dr. Ann was that she'd make a response to something, then post this long message about the sins of Askimet, and it was always the same long message on every post. Sorry, but to everyone I know that's spam. If it has nothing to do with the topic at large, it's spam, pure and simple.
Free speech isn't free when someone else is paying for it. No one gets to set an agenda against something and post it everywhere, especially when it has nothing to do with the topic someone else is writing about. To me, Askimet has done a great job of blocking spam. I have it set to never delete any messages; I always go through the messages to see if there's something that I believe is legitimate.
I tend to not believe that there's this conspiracy against any one person that Askimet decides to hunt for. Do I believe some people could game the system? Absolutely; that happens with Google as well. If I were hurt by it would I fight it? Absolutely. Would I go around posting it on every person's blog I could find just to fight the cause? Absolutely NOT! That's spam, and I'd deserve to have my information logged as such.
That Linda Christas organization seems to have its people going out posting messages to blogs like mine to support their point and to quasi-threaten me is shameful. I could care less about them, but if this organization is doing something like that then I have many things I can equate them with, and none of them are good. Leone, one of your minions, found her way to my blog and wrote what I consider as a spam message, yet I'm leaving it there as proof that Askimet let her post come through. Yeah, the big bad Askimet; pbfft!
Mitch 06/19/2010
My issue with Akismet-enabled blogs is that comments keep going into spam (which most bloggers do NOT check) or I'm blocked altogether (Google Akismet white page to get an idea of this issue, many posts dating back to 2007 - its never been fixed), even though I write legitimate comments related to the post (like this one). Akismet denies having any sort of global blacklist and say they are simply tailoring the filter for each blog individually. However, to prove that is false, I set up a new, fresh Wordpress blog, applied and received an Akismet API key and did some test comments. Sure enough, every single one went directly to spam, even though I kept voting them out of spam. If it were tailoring to my input, it would stop trashing my comments. Worse, when contacted, Akismet is completely unhelpful and unsympathetic, even when one can actually get a reply out of them, which is difficult at best. It would be one thing if the Akismet system simply deleted bot spam. I'm not a bad programmer, and I'm certain I could devise a way to block only bot spam. This would be perfectly legitimate. However, to trash out of hand a human's well-thought-through comment that he or she spent their valuable time writing is a sin, in my opinion.
Ted 06/19/2010
I have only one concern here. Does Mitch allow Akismet to abuse visitors to his blog? Does he or does he not follow the first principle of business and that is to be nice, and only allow services to operate on his blog that are nice TO EVERYONE.
If Mitch's answer to that is that he doesn't use a service that mistreats people FOR ANY REASON, then I have no issue with Mitch, and I would consider becoming Mitch's admirer.
If he does use an abusive service, then there isn't a chance on Earth that I would consider allowing Mitch into my business or personal world now or later on in life.
Bobbie '12
Bobbie 06/19/2010
I don't personally use Akismet anymore, because I switched to Disqus which actually combats spam much better to me.
The thing is, my blogs are my businesses, and I can run them how I please. Usually that means that if it doesn't include me making money, then I am wasting my time.
People that comment for links are ALL spammers IMHO, and as far as I am concerned they should be banned from commenting. I don't owe anyone a link from my site, and certainly not one just because they comment.
What you may or may not realize, is that many of us gets hundreds, even thousands of comments that are just spam. We have a right to protect ourselves from it, because if it gets through, and the link is to a "bad neighborhood", our sites WILL suffer in the searches because of it. It only takes once for that to happen at the right time (when the Google bot comes through at the same time), and some of us could lose hundreds or even thousands of dollars because of it.
I am sorry to hear the "some" comments get caught up in this that probably shouldn't, but I think it is a necessary evil that actually does more good than harm...
Keith 06/20/2010
This is a creative way of tackling commenting on blogs. Very well presented and thought provoking.
S.T. 09/11/2010
I'm having multiple complaints a day about posts and blogs being blocked by Askimet. I sent an email to their support with my phone number but have yet to receive a reply. I've read some of the posts that have been blocked and I'm not quite sure about the why or what involved in the rationale to block. Is there a list of rules or standards that I can share with the end-users to minimize the blocks? Any assistance is welcome.
Arturo
Arturo 09/21/2010
@Arturo - The only way to avoid Akismet ban is to feel out the blogger in question before sharing your real email and website url with them via the comment box. Make a "friend" first and then perhaps share that info. Because the first "mean" blogger one runs across, bam, you are banned from all Wordpress sites, probably for good. That's a large portion of the Internet - scary. Best of luck, folks.
Jim 09/21/2010
I was pleasantly surprised that the Akismet folks really do read emails for reconsiderations. Less than 24 hours after I sent my email, I got a response saying everything should be fine now. Woot! Because of that, here's a little Akismet love for them. If you guys feel that you are banned wrongly by Akismet, you can always send an email to those cool guys over there at: Akismet Help
claire@men's blog 10/10/2010
Yes, I have been a victim of Akismet's wrath. Or should I say "someone's" wrath.
I don't think people realize how rude Akismet is. If they did, I think that most people are too decent to use it.
Bailey