Year: 2015

Akismet 3.1.5: Security Release

by Christopher Finke October 13, 2015

Version 3.1.5 of the Akismet plugin for WordPress contains a critical security fix. Update your sites as soon as possible.

A researcher from Sucuri notified us of an XSS vulnerability in the Akismet WordPress plugin. This bug affects all versions of the Akismet WordPress plugin since 2.5.0, but we have no evidence that it has been exploited in the wild.

We’ve released updates for all vulnerable versions of the Akismet plugin. Additionally, the WordPress.org plugins team has enabled an automatic update for all sites running these vulnerable versions that are able to auto-update plugins.

Because the vulnerability is theoretically exploitable via comments, Akismet is already blocking attempts during the comment-check API call even if you are not running the most recent version. However, to be as safe as possible, you should still upgrade immediately.

To upgrade, visit the Updates page of your WordPress dashboard and follow the instructions. If you need to download the plugin zip file directly, links to all versions are available in the WordPress plugins directory.

Akismet WordPress Plugin 3.1.4

by Christopher Finke September 24, 2015

Version 3.1.4 of the Akismet plugin for WordPress is now available.

This update clarifies the error messages that Akismet uses so that they’re easier to understand, and it enables link previews in the admin for all links in a comment — not just the author’s website link. A fix is also included for a bug that could have caused comment moderation emails to be sent for some comments that were caught as spam. For a full list of the changes in this release, see the revision log.

To upgrade, visit the Updates page of your WordPress dashboard and follow the instructions. If you need to download the plugin zip file directly, links to all versions are available in the WordPress plugins directory.

Quantifying Reddit Bigotry

by Anthony Bubel August 27, 2015

Update (2015-08-30): It looks like the team who created the tool decided to retire it due to some reported accuracy concerns.

We never pass on the opportunity to mix in a little bit of humor with our passion for web content moderation.

One of our engineers, Dan Walmsley, participated in Cultivated Wit’s Comedy Hack Day in Los Angeles last weekend, and his team’s resulting project has since surfaced on Motherboard and Engadget.

Free Reddit Check, created by Dan’s team and crowned with the day’s top prize, is a site which attempts to quantify the terribleness of Reddit users based on their public comment content and subreddit participation. While perfectly suited for a hack day which pairs developers and comedians, there is certainly usefulness in determining the respectability of a potential online acquaintance. Or just knowing who to ignore.

And being obsessed with content analysis, community moderation, and keeping the web’s underbelly in check, we can’t help but think it’s a nifty idea.

Akismet WordPress Plugin 3.1.3

by Christopher Finke July 6, 2015

Version 3.1.3 of the Akismet plugin for WordPress is now available.

This update addresses an issue causing some users to see blank Akismet settings screens. After installing this update, the settings screen should either load successfully, or it will display an error message with instructions for fixing the problem.

To upgrade, visit the Updates page of your WordPress dashboard and follow the instructions. If you need to download the plugin zip file directly, links to all versions are available in the WordPress plugins directory.

Akismet WordPress Plugin 3.1.2

by Christopher Finke June 8, 2015

Version 3.1.2 of the Akismet plugin for WordPress is now available.

This update includes seventeen fixes and enhancements; they’re summarized in the changelog (or for all of the details, the revision log), but notably, Akismet will be easier to set up, use less space in your database, and be better protected against security holes — specifically ones in other plugins.

To upgrade, visit the Updates page of your WordPress dashboard and follow the instructions. If you need to download the plugin zip file directly, links to all versions are available in the WordPress plugins directory.

April 2015 Stats Roundup

by coolavalcado May 1, 2015

April turned out to be a slow month in Akismetland. The highest number of spam comments we saw come in this month on a given day was about 177 million. The total amount of spam we saw come through this month is 23% less than last month, and 33% less than April of last year.

Here’s a chart showing the number of spam and ham comments we saw come through each day this month:

graph of akismet spam and ham daily stats April 2015

This image, .Time Machine. by Sachin Sandhu, is licensed under CC BY 2.0

This image, .Time Machine. by Sachin Sandhu, is licensed under CC BY 2.0

The total number of spam comments this month is 4,167,247,500 – just over four billion, which is still a big number even though it’s a slow month 😀. To help visualize this number, let’s say it takes a second to count each spam message. In that case, it would take 132 years and two months to finish counting.

As for ham – we saw a total of 145,308,000 real messages come through. If we were counting each one of those, it would take only 4 and a half years to finish. As usual, there’s much more spam going around than real messages – only 3.4% of all messages sent this month were not spam.

We missed only about 1 in every 10,443 spams this month. If you are seeing spam in your comments, please mark it as spam – this will help Akismet learn from your input. Similarly, please mark any real comments that end up in the spam folder as ‘not spam’. If you’re seeing very many mislabelled comments, please contact us about it and we’ll be happy to help dig into the issue.

This post is part of a monthly series summarizing some stats and figures from the Akismet universe. Feel free to browse all of the posts in the series.

March 2015 Stats Roundup

by coolavalcado April 1, 2015

In March, Akismet saw 5,426,166,500 spam comments go through. Though this was a rise of 32% since last month, it’s a decrease from last year’s March by 19 percent. It’s been a quiet March.

If we wanted to visualize this number, we could write down each spam comment on a piece of paper and ask each person in the USA to hold on to them. In that case, each person would be holding onto 17 pieces of paper to cover all of the spam we received.

As usual, Akismet saw much less ham go around this month – only about 2.7% of all comments were real comments. We’d need only half of the people in the United States to hold just one piece of paper to cover all the ham comments – there were 147,994,500 total ham comments going through.

Here’s a chart breaking down the numbers per day:

graph of akismet spam and ham daily stats February 2015

The busiest day of the month was the 20th, with 198,630,500 spam comments. The slowest day was the 15th with 146,041,500.

If you’re having any trouble with spam comments getting through on your site, or any false positives in your spam folder, feel free to contact us so we can help :).

This post is part of a monthly series summarizing some stats and figures from the Akismet universe. Feel free to browse all of the posts in the series.

Akismet WordPress Plugin 3.1.1

by Christopher Finke March 17, 2015

Version 3.1.1 of the Akismet plugin for WordPress is now available.

This update includes an improvement to the “Remove comment author URL” feature and merges the pingback DDOS protection from Akismet 2.x into the 3.x plugin line.

To upgrade, visit the Updates page of your WordPress dashboard and follow the instructions. If you need to download the plugin zip file directly, links to all versions are available in the WordPress plugins directory.