WP Discourse Posts Flagged by Akismet

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I’m not sure what is routinely causing Akismet to flag posts of this type, but the only posts that are getting flagged as possible SPAM are those that are getting published through the WP Discourse plugin from our Wordpress site. Not all of the topics that get published this way are being flagged, but several (non-consecutive ones) have been.

To try and resolve this internally, I’ve changed the Akismet TL setting to what I’d assume is so permissive as to warrant disabling the plugin altogether…

skip akismet trust level 0: new user

Our discourse site is setup so that it’s invite only, or only auto-admits individuals from select email domains, and gives everyone a TL1, rather than starting at 0. The posts published through the WP Discourse plugin are being authored by a TL1 account.

The activity for this user indicates there were no flags given/received. So what is being flagged, the post? All of the Akismet plugin settings seem related to parameters associated with a user, not anything to do with the post content itself…

I newly lowered skip akismet posts 5 (from 50, the default setting), so will see if that allows us better success.

Some other unique characteristics about these posts: they are all getting published to a category that is viewable/editable by a closed group (and admin), no one else has any degree of access. The author for these posts is within the closed group.

If there are other ideas about what might be prompting these posts to get flagged, or a source or more information about how Akismet determines is causes for flagging, I’d be happy to hear them.

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Are you on latest Discourse? Are you reporting these as not-spam? Akismet should (in theory) learn that these posts to your domain are not spam through training.

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Ah, good to know. I looked back at our review record and found that a few had been rejected as SPAM, so will be diligent in approving them as non-SPAM instead, to see if we can get it to lean the other way.

Although not a burning question, I’d be interested to learn what caused these to initially be flagged by Akisment. Perhaps a significant number of posts all being created in one category by username that hadn’t previously posted?

We’re on a hosted plan, so latest update to Discourse was about two weeks ago.

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There were some issues that were affecting Akismet’s ability to learn from false positive reports that have been fixed in a recent update to the plugin. The fix for those issues was deployed to your site a few hours ago. After marking a few posts published by the plugin as not-spam, let us know if posts published from your website continue to be marked as spam.

The only posts published from your website that should be marked as spam are posts that are published by Discourse users who have a lower trust level than your skip akismet trust level site setting. With its default settings, the Akismet plugin will only check posts that are created by Trust Level 0 users.

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