Akismet is Good, But It's Not That Good

Akismet is the friend of all bloggers.  It snags suspected spam comments and known spam comments.  And over time, many folk become rather accustomed to it doing its job.

But I found a serious flaw with Akismet that is rather disappointing or maybe could be looked at as annoying.

On a few occasions I've had someone come to the site to be a troll and I just decided enough is enough.  So I told Akismet to spam the user.  Sure enough, next time back it worked on him.  But then he changed how he was signing his comments, and he was getting through the filter again, despite coming from the same IP address his other name came from.

So I spammed that comment.  He changed his user name, again, same IP, and I had to manually remove his troll comment again.  And again, and again and again.  I was getting ready to just spam all blackberry addresses, since this visitor was coming from a Blackberry address, but decided against it.

So the user used different user names and he came in via a few different IP addresses.  Maybe 3 different ones.  I always thought Akismet was IP based, but it seems that maybe its not.

Of course, as a blogger, you could pay the $5 per month and get an API key and then, it would probably go to town on this cretin.  And I may just do that.  I haven't been using it for that long, and overall, it does seem to work.

But I thought you should be apprised.