Did you notice your comments being overrun by a tsunami of spam today, leaving you powerless in the face of a wall of Cialis ads? No? Okay, maybe I’m exaggerating a bit. Akismet, everybody’s favorite anti-spam service, experienced two partial outages earlier today. From the blog post:
The first [problem] was a network configuration problem that caused some servers to be unresponsive. Some users may have noticed problems during a 15 minute window starting around 12.30pm PST.
The second was caused by some spurious code that was inadvertently deployed to our production servers. The majority of API calls resulted in an invalid response for a 30 minute period starting around 11.00pm PST.
Servers were unresponsive and unable to process potentially spammy comments. Hopefully they can avoid any problems in the future. But hey, if you were seriously inconvenienced by this that means your blog is getting a lot of comments. Good problem, right? If anything this should remind everybody what a vital role Akismet and other spam blockers play in maintaining manageable comment systems on WordPress blogs.
Did you notice the outage or is this news to you?
This outage was just part of Matt’s New Year resolution to mess with our heads in 2012.
Next, he’s going to sell Andrew Nacin to the Minnesota Vikings.
Alright…. Who is paying for my new keyboard now that I just spit coffee all over my current one?
I didn’t even notice…. either nobody loves the Rev….. or Cookies for Comments was holding strong! I hope it’s the latter…..
(man I wish we could upvote comments… 😀 )
Anyway, what I was going to point out is, that this is a good reminder to also fill out the internal nicely built in blacklist and other moderation settings.
So on the of chance a service goes down, someone disables a plugin, or whatever – then you still have a backup plan.
Ah, good point Andrea. I should do that.
I didn’t notice any Cialis spam (at least not on my blogs), but then again I don’t use Akismet any more. I read a post by Millan of Dev4Press a while back about the Antispam Bee plugin. It doesn’t rely on a third party server, doesn’t have the same privacy concerns and it’s free for everyone. I’ve been really happy with it.
http://www.dev4press.com/2011/blog/do-you-really-need-akismet/
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