Askimet thinks I’m a spammer.
Thankfully, Scott Karp, among others, knows I’m not a spammer. But he has had to hassle four or five times recently to fish my comments out of Askimet’s spam bucket. That led to this post.
On any blog that is using Askimet’s spam filter, if I leave a comment, my comment goes into the spam bucket.
Why? Apparently, it’s related to the fact that my site was hacked twice. One of those hacks involved putting a redirect page in one of my directories, and then the spammers sent traffic from hundreds of other hacked blogs to that page.
That was great for my technorati ranking, not so great for my reputation with Askimet.
I’ve written to Askimet and asked to be taken off the back list. So far, the request has been ignored.
I pretty much hated spammers before these incidents. My inclination to think they should all be shot on sight is hard to resist, even as much as I strongly believe in full and fair trails for all accused criminals. Here’s to hoping people like Alan Ralsky, assuming he’s convicted, get punished to the full extent of the law. We need thousand more prosecutions like this, but then I suspect most spammers reside in countries where the government could careless. Hopefully, someday, those governments will join the civilized world and come to hate spam as much as the rest of us do.
UDPATE: Afternoon of Jan. 9, 2008. I just got an e-mail from Askimet saying I’ve been unblacklisted.
Howard,
I have no idea whether this is relevant to this topic, but via your RSS feed all your posts show additional two lines at the bottom, like this:
“governments will join the civilized world and come to hate spam as much as the rest of us do.
time saved
time saved”
Maybe there are still some traces of the hack…
I went through several PHP files that seemed likely to contain the stray code but can’t find it.
I’ve never been hacked, but I am also often blocked by anti-spamming software, usually when I use the address for my artist’s blog, which may have been hacked before I started writing for it. My Blogspot blog also gets denied quite a bit; my WordPress blog has gone through every time so far.
It’s annoying, especially since I still don’t know why those accounts can’t comment on certain blogs/ news sites.
Try linking to Matt.
Just to throw all your weird, possibly-related technical issues into one place: You’re also blocked in China, or at least you were when I was there two weeks ago, and have been for about as long as I’ve been reading your blog (about a year). No idea why. Just thought I’d let you know.
Howard –
I just noticed your comment to my blog because of the post, so this is a timely message. And the other four comments akismet blocked from my blog weren’t span, either.
My favorite webcomic devoted a day to this: http://tinyurl.com/27r3n5
Yay! Your stuff got caught in my filter too. Hopefully this puts an end to it.