The lack of human interaction within the Akismet system seems to affect different platforms. Of course, one of them is WordPress which has a native Akismet plugin, by default.

Why is Akismet a danger for bloggers ? Here’s a basic example: If a blogger posts an article and a few persons decide to post comments to that article, which the author (who is probably the blog owner) doesn’t like, he might mark some comments as spam, in spite of the fact that those comments are valid (but just use a different approach on the subject).

That’s a nasty example of a cruel blog owner. If the flagged comment author has a blog then he has at least one problem. This will affect his ability of getting some traffic back to his blog by commenting on different blogs and other drawbacks.

This method seems to be used between competing blog owners but it can happen to anyone. Unfortunately Akismet doesn’t provide any kind of protection regarding this problem and when you have the bad luck of being flagged you can only hope that someone from the small staff will get back to you and promise that your situation will be analyzed and hopefully solved, after you send them an email describing your problem, of course.

Firstly, Akismet should provide a contact form for this kind of problems. Of course if that happens, a huge amount of email (valid and spam as well) will “bombard” the contact address (and i don’t think they can deal with that). That isn’t a good thing for the small staff behind Akismet. Remember that Akismet is a free service ! If Akismet decides to cry out for help (before the whole system comes down) they should consider very well what kind of help is offered and from where it comes.

I think Akismet should also provide some kind of registration system based on email addresses. Every email address will have a corresponding password which you will have to fill in when you post a comment. Otherwise you won’t be able to leave a comment. This however is not such a great idea because basically you will need to have an Akismet account (this can have a bunch of advantages) to leave a comment. But there is an alternative. Some checkboxes to choose the comment system which you want to use when leaving a comment. Of course this is really complicated and it shouldn’t be, but given the stats this problem should concern everyone.

Why should there be a registration system ? Here’s a reason: Let’s say i have 5 blogs on which i have admin privileges. I post several comments using the e-mail address i want to be flagged by Akismet and the mark them as spam. That’s all. Now all valid comments from that email will be filtered by Akismet. I hope i didn’t give you some bad ideas.

The purpose of this article is to highlight some potential problems and to notify whoever reads it. I belive Akismet could be the next major spam filtering entity out there for blogs (if it isn’t already).


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