Akismet Timeout Problems. Solved.
Over the past couple of months I've become more and more disenchanted with Akismet - or more and more angry with the amount of spam that I receive.
Overall, Akismet is very good at grabbing spam, and very good at letting real comments through. However, it's not fail-safe, and I know that some real comments have been tagged as spam and deleted…
The reason for this, is that some spammers use very, very long posts with multiple [url=blah]blah[/url] type of posts. When opening up the Akismet editing page, Akismet would usually hang on these and not let me see any of the older comments. Hence I could not check all comments to make sure that I am NOT deleting real comments…
It got to the point where I decided to uninstall Akismet - but then I rethought the situation and took a look at a code solution…
Basically, all I had to was stop the full comment showing, and just show an excerpt. After all, real comments that get Akismet'd are easy to spot, so just an excerpt is more than enough to see what's what. So I simply opened up the Akismet plugin and found;
comment_text()
I changed this to;
comment_excerpt()
This code is on approximately line 444 of the standard Akismet plugin. Now, all posts caught by Akismet simply show an excerpt, nothing times out and I can now check every comment before deletion!
Easy as 123.
Comment by SarahG — August 6, 2007 @ 9:36 am
I'd recommend also changing your comment script file. I do this on my blogs and it cuts spam incredibly as the bots are written to post to the default page, not your newly named one. Only annoyance is having to remember to change the filename on an upgrade.
If you change your comments template file to post the comment form from wp-comments-post.php to say wpc.php and then change the filename of the same name in the root to wpc.php also. It saves on your database getting the spam and Akismet having to even do the work. Of course it doesn't prevent the trackback spam, but it'll help cut spam comments down a bit.
Comment by Gary — August 7, 2007 @ 3:55 pm
Sarah, cheers for that. Done this now