Our system user has the resounding approval rate of 94% :-1:. The akismet filter just completely misses on a lot of technical posts like this one — that’s a post by a TL1 user who has been around for 8 months with no outbound links. At the same time, it’s missing obvious spam with direct links to gambling sites. We’ve tried disabling Akismet because it just creates extra work: we get far far more false positives than true positives. But that doesn’t seem to work; new topics like the above are still getting flagged, even though we’ve set “skip akismet trust level” to be 0. Now that I’m looking into this I see we still have the default 50-post skip setting; I’m unsure how those settings interact. Is there an implicit “AND” between those two settings? [image]

Just to finish out this topic, the above extension patch has now propagated to our instance. We’ve disabled Akismet (except user bio checking, which is the only thing that actually seems to work with any level of reliability) with the following settings: [image] (It probably had propagated earlier, but I had missed it since the keyword akismet does not appear in the setting itself so simply searching akismet does not bring it up).

No, looking at the code reveals that posts are not checked if either of those settings is true. However, (to my surprise) there is a hardcoded rule so it always checks the first post of a TL1 user, regardless of skip_akismet_trust_level setting.

I can’t speak to the technicals of our implementation of Akismet, but I do believe we send feedback to the algorithm when you select a flag option. As you verify spam and ham posts through the review queue, you’re helping train Akismet.

@mbauman how do you find the system user approval rate? I’m sure our number would be worse. I’m not sure I remember ever having an Askimet-flagged post actually be spam. And BTW our settings are at this & still seeing posts being flagged (I’m about to adjust the trust level to match yours.) [Selection_1096]

Looks like this should be able to be worked around with: https://github.com/discourse/discourse-akismet/pull/52 Could a new version of the Akismet plugin including this patch be tagged/rolled-out to hosted customers?

Akismet filter misses so frequently; how to disable/improve?

Product Support

mbauman (Matt Bauman) January 25, 2022, 7:19pm 5

The rate appears on the flagged items themselves:

Glad to hear it’s not just us — is something else going sideways here? Or is akismet just not as helpful these days?

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Akismet filter misses so frequently; how to disable/improve?

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