Greasemonkey Script: Akismet Auntie Spam for WordPress

akismet-auntie-spam-angry-old-teacher-lady.jpgAkismet Auntie Spam is a maintenance script for WordPress administrators. One of the problems with the Akismet spam protection service is that sometimes it misidentifies a real comment as spam. WordPress has a spam recovery console that I like to call the spam inbox.

Have you ever stuck your hand as far back at you can into the crannies of your couch and pulled out what you found? That’s kind of what going into the default Akismet spam inbox is like. It’s a dark and evil place, filled with things that will make your eyes burn. You only wanted to find the quarter you lost, but before you know it your hand is stuck and something is touching you back.

Akismet Auntie Spam is a kind old lady who will come to your house and give it a thorough cleaning. She’s not afraid of the dark corners, particularly the spam inbox because she knows exactly how to handle the creepy crawlies hiding out of sight.

Akismet Auntie Spam is not a WordPress plugin. It is a script for the Firefox web browser that will work with any installation of WordPress or WordPress Multi-user — that means you can use it with WordPress.com, Edublogs.org, Blogsome.com and any site that is running WordPress with Akismet. Version 2 is a complete rewrite from scratch, and it is much less complicated now. There are no knobs and buttons for users to twiddle with — it works out of the box, the same way for everyone. Auntie Spam is here for one reason and that’s to save you time.

Akismet Auntie Spam is in no way affiliated with WordPress or Auttomatic — it’s a script I created to make it a hell of a lot easier to watch out for false spam.

How to Install

What Does Akismet Auntie Spam Do?

Much less time is spent navigating your spam inbox. You can see it all on one page, and it doesn’t take nearly as long to scroll through as it would without Akismet Auntie Spam installed.

  • Fetches all of your spam comments and displays them on one page.
  • Sorts spammers by the amount of spam they’ve sent.
  • Shows only the first line of spam, so less time is spent scrolling.
  • Completely hide obvious spam.
  • Automatically checks for a new version of itself every two weeks.

Show Me How It Works

Go to your spam inbox on your WordPress dashboard console.

wordpress comments akismet dashboard

Auntie Spam will immediately kick in and download all of the spam at once — no navigating between 10s to 100s of individual pages of spam.

Akismet Auntie Spam will automatically download all of your spam

You can do something else like check your RSS feeds while she grabs all of your spammy comments and organizes them.

Auntie Spam has finished downloading

Spam is sorted from newest to oldest and categorized from most spammy to least spammy. She groups spam by identifying the computer it came from, so surprisingly enough the more spam you have the easier it is to look through it all. She even summarizes it all by only showing the first line.

Spam is compressed - only the first line

Auntie Spam hates those idiots who keep sending you spam again and again. They can be completely ignored.

obvious spam is completely hidden

As you read through all the comment summaries, you may come across one that looks like it isn’t spam. Click on the ‘# comments’ link and Auntie Spam will show you the full text of the comment and give you the option to mark it as not spam.

Click to see the full comment and to mark it as not spam

Once all the spam is loaded there no need to reload it all because you want to search for something specific — hit Ctrl+F and use Firefox’s built in page search.

Search from within your browser instead of using the website

When it comes to de-spamming marked comments, or deleting all comments, Auntie Spam gets out of the way and things work the same way they always have.

despaming or deleting all comments

all spam deleted -- no spam found

If Auntie Spam is doing something you don’t want here to, you can return to way things have always been with a single click on the Greasemonkey icon and reloading the page.

turn greasemonkey on and off

What Are You Waiting For?

If you’re running WordPress and you’ve ever had to go dumpster diving for a comment that was accidentally marked as spam then you need Akismet Auntie Spam.

Like it? Link it!

I’m glad you find it useful. I have too much spam and the regular Akismet view didn’t cut it for me.

Show your appreciation by linking to this page: http://internetducttape.com/tools/wordpress/akismet-auntie-spam/

More Scripts

You can get frequent updates about all of my new software, tools or blog themes by subscribing to IDT Labs by RSS or by email. Or you could just subscribe to my main blog, Internet Duct Tape.

99 Comments

  1. Posted January 10, 2007 at | Permalink

    very awesome, thank you!

  2. Posted January 10, 2007 at | Permalink

    Very nice script, thank you!

  3. Posted January 10, 2007 at | Permalink

    I was thinking it was just my blog. Yeah the spam is up and up in a big way. As you know I usually check my spam for genuine comments but the volume that I have been getting has made this next to impossible due to the time that it takes.

    Nice work on the script I’ll have to give it a crack.

  4. Posted January 10, 2007 at | Permalink

    Tell me about it. My Akismet queue has 3000 for the past two weeks.

  5. Posted January 11, 2007 at | Permalink

    Updated so it should work for any wordpress install, not just wordpress.com

  6. Posted January 11, 2007 at | Permalink

    Thank you. This is so slick.

    Also, thanks for the mods. I’ve mentioned this to the edublogses. (edublogs.org learnerblogs.org uniblogs.org eslblogs.org)

  7. Posted January 11, 2007 at | Permalink

    Cool! This is great.

  8. Posted January 12, 2007 at | Permalink

    Cool works very well. Worked fine with:

    Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.2pre) Gecko/20070111 BonEcho/2.0.0.2pre ID:2007011103

  9. Posted January 13, 2007 at | Permalink

    Sweet! Thanks for the great work.

  10. Posted January 15, 2007 at | Permalink

    It works very well - the only change I had to make was to alter the target from edit-comments.php to edit.php - presumably this is something to do with the WP theme I am using.

  11. Posted March 17, 2007 at | Permalink

    This script is FRIGGIN’ AWESOME!!!!!!!!!

    Thank you SOOO much, ’cause I haven’t even gotten around to doing this myself! I was thinking that if I could just have a quick list that I could scan, it’d make it easier to blow through all the spam-cruft!

    T A N X A M I L L I O N ! ! !

  12. Posted March 18, 2007 at | Permalink

    I am getting about one thousand spam comments a day lately. It is driving me crazy to try to look for false positives, so I just don’t.

  13. Posted March 18, 2007 at | Permalink

    great script. thanks a lot….

  14. Posted March 23, 2007 at | Permalink

    I should add a feature where you can put keywords to ignore for the author name — to completely hide the spam you’re sure about.

  15. Posted April 30, 2007 at | Permalink

    Hi engtech,

    Auntie Spam is indispensible. I installed it as soon as my level of spam got high enough to really need it. That was a couple of weeks ago. Akismet has been pretty accurate since then, and only today sent a legit comment to the spam category. My only problem was, I couldn’t find a way to mark it as “not spam” in order to de-spam it. I had to temporarily disable Auntie Spam, return the the regular interface, mark it as “not spam,” and de-spam it that way. Am I missing something somewhere?

    Thanks for your nice tools/features to use with the wp.com software. It’s nice to be able to customize a little even though we’re on the hosted version of wp.

  16. Posted April 30, 2007 at | Permalink

    @john: I’ve never seen that before.

    I just deleted my copy of it, reinstalled Akismet Auntie Spam, and double checked and I was able to see the “not spam” checkbox. It’s on the gray line.

    The “not spam” box is removed for the lines that were turned red because of spam keywords… was the comment one of those?

  17. Posted May 01, 2007 at | Permalink

    Ah yes, it was a legit comment that was red. Actually, the commenter just pasted a whole article into a comment. (which we’ve had to have a little talk about in terms of copyright :) ) There must be some keyword in there. No biggie. It’s not likely to happen more than rarely, I think. Good to know what’s going on. Thanks.

  18. Posted May 01, 2007 at | Permalink

    Ah, that explains it.

    I’ll leave the “not spam” line in for the red ones too in the future.

  19. Posted May 09, 2007 at | Permalink

    You know, I’m not even sure it would be so good to leave the “not spam” line in for the red ones. What I encountered was, I think, really rare. And if the line would take up more space, as it does now for the yellow ones (I get about 95% red) I’m not sure it would be worth it. Once every couple of months I can disable the utility, and despam a legit comment that happens to be red. I don’t think it will happen more often than that. (I think it was just because the commenter pasted a whole article in a comment, so it had so many words that one or two turned out to be spam words.) Just my thoughts at the moment.

  20. Posted July 31, 2007 at | Permalink

    Ever have one of those weeks? Akismet has decided that all comments from me are spam and there’s nothing I can do about it, other than politely emailing the blogs I regularly post to and asking them to go dumpster diving for me.

    I’ve updated my Akismet Auntie Spam script for Firefox so that
    – Hovering over the “super compressed” spam gives you a preview with an option to mark it as not spam.
    – You can edit the script and enter keywords that you want to see pointed out as NOT SPAM. This is great for putting in your own blog name, or for putting in friends who always get marked as spam.

  21. Posted August 01, 2007 at | Permalink

    I installed the new version then noticed the earlier versions were also installed. I have disabled what seems to be the earlier ones (there’s a date in the July release).

    I assume I can delete the earlier ones entirely after I make sure the new script functions?

  22. Posted August 02, 2007 at | Permalink

    Yuppers!

    Unintended side effect of switching from engtech.wordpress.com to internetducttape.com… registered as a different script.

    whoopsies

  23. Posted August 03, 2007 at | Permalink

    Engtech:

    You need to be more specific IN the post instructions (not comments) on the new features and how to use them. I finally figured out how to open the script and edit it, though I don’t know if I did it right, and then upload it to Greasemonkey but it’s not working. There’s something I’m missing and I’m anxious to try out the new features.

  24. Posted August 03, 2007 at | Permalink

    @Lorelle: I’ve updated the documentation on this page (see: Advanced Users).

    I’m trying to figure out a good way of doing settings like that inline instead of requiring people to edit script… but Greasemonkey doesn’t have a built-in UI library.

  25. Posted August 03, 2007 at | Permalink

    And yes, that comment was just marked as spam.

    I hate you, Akismet.

  26. Posted August 04, 2007 at | Permalink

    The comment from me or you? You, I understand. Me, that’s ANOTHER issue. :D

    I’ll check out the documentation.

    Is there a way to get Greasemonkey to add variables through the options and hold them in a file? Then let the script call the variables for the keyword that the user wants to include or not include in the highlighting feature.

  27. Posted August 04, 2007 at | Permalink

    @Lorelle: It’s my comments it’s chucking into akismet. Every comment on every blog everywhere. Sigh.

    Yup, you can configure greasemonkey to store variables… I just have to figure out how to build a reliable user interface in HTML and have it pop up.

  28. Posted August 05, 2007 at | Permalink

    “Hovering over the “super compressed” spam gives you a preview with an option to mark it as not spam.”

    That was a brilliant solution. Even though I have not had a false positive among those red, “super compressed” comments since my last post here (a tribute to Auntie Spam’s accuracy, I think?), the next time I do, it will be easy to mark as “not spam.” Thanks!

  29. Posted August 09, 2007 at | Permalink

    @John Feeney:

    Let me know if the way comments pop out when you hover over red is too annoying. I might be able to use another technique where put an icon or something and if only pops up if you hover over that icon.

  30. Posted August 10, 2007 at | Permalink

    engtech,

    It doesn’t bother me at this point. I think it kind of did right at first, but I quickly learned just to scan the entries visually and only mouse over them if I wanted to look at one more closely. But, yeah, that would be a little better to use an icon as you mention. Not a big deal, but it would be a small improvement.

  31. Posted August 10, 2007 at | Permalink

    @John Feeney:

    I think I’ll do it. I’m finding it annoying without it. I also want to make it easier to change settings as per Lorelle.

    Adding autoscroll would be neat, too.

  32. Posted August 15, 2007 at | Permalink

    Yeah, actually I think it would be a good tweak.

  33. Posted August 16, 2007 at | Permalink

    I’m completely re-writing AkismetAuntieSpam. New version is pretty sweet right now. :)

    Will run very nicely at identifying spam with no configuration changes required.

  34. Posted August 20, 2007 at | Permalink

    I’m looking for user feedback on the new Akismet Auntie Spam.

    Install it here:

    http://internet-duct-tape.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/greasemonkey/akismetauntiespamforword.user.js

    It won’t be official until it’s been bruised up by real people.

  35. Posted August 22, 2007 at | Permalink

    engtech,

    I uninstalled the previous version and installed the newest one (yesterday) from the link in your comment above. But it didn’t seem to work. (saw the standard wordpress.com screen for spam) It showed a message which read something like, “Ack! Couldn’t find the number of pages!” Thoughts?

  36. Posted August 23, 2007 at | Permalink

    Looks like you have no spam!

    I’ll improve that message.

  37. Posted August 23, 2007 at | Permalink

    But then I waited till I got a spam (didn’t take long) and just got the standard wordpress page with the whole message in full. I’ll give it another go and report back.

  38. Posted August 23, 2007 at | Permalink

    That didn’t take long. I just had a chance to deal with a couple of spam twice in 5 minutes. I’m just getting the standard wordpress view of them.

    FYI, I just went tools > greasmonkey > manage user scripts, and clisked uninstall. Then I installed from the link above. Maybe I need to restart firefox?

  39. Posted August 23, 2007 at | Permalink

    Restarting didn’t help, and I’m able to switch back to the previous version with no problem. Hmmm…

  40. Posted August 23, 2007 at | Permalink

    @John Feeney:

    I’ve released v2.0 now. http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/7037

    2007/08/23
    - Rewrote from scratch using IP filtering idea from Donncha.
    - Will now fetch all of your spam comments and display them on one page.
    - Groups by the originating IP address.
    - Because it groups by IP address, the more spam you have, the more likely it is to
    correctly identify spam!
    - Sorted by the least number of spam comments to the most number of spam comments.
    - IP addresses with more than 5 comments are hidden (as the are likely spammers).
    - Can easily check the hidden text by moving your mouse over the parts that say [hidden]
    - Surprisingly much faster than the old version! (less code, too)
    - No longer has any confusing configuration options — does the right thing all the time.
    - Automatically checks for script updates every two weeks.

    #respond

  41. Posted August 23, 2007 at | Permalink

    Engtech,

    I tried a bunch of stuff (disabled all extenstions, uninstalled and reinstalled greasemonkey as well as Auntie Spam, etc.). Still getting only the standard wordpress.com page when I look at spam. When I have no spam I get the message ~ “You have no spam.” But when I have spam I get, “ACK! Couldn’t find the number of pages!”

    Thoughts?

  42. Posted August 23, 2007 at | Permalink

    @John Feeney:

    Definitely a bug with not handling one page of spam well. Thanks!

    Script is fixed now.

  43. Posted August 23, 2007 at | Permalink

    Yep, it’s working fine now. Thanks.

  44. Posted September 13, 2007 at | Permalink

    2007/09/12
    - Newest spam displays first
    - Akismet search doesn’t function well with Auntie Spam, so use browser search instead (Ctrl+F)
    - Added logo branding
    - Screenshots explaining upfront how it works

  45. Posted September 17, 2007 at | Permalink

    2007/09/17 version 2.03
    - Added FirebugUtils to prevent console.logs from breaking the script
    - Changed to work with the AdminSSL plugin. Thanks to Jan @ http://wp.dembowski.net/

  46. Posted September 18, 2007 at | Permalink

    This is wonderful, thanks! No more scrolling through screeds of endless adverts for cars and “enhancements” (bizarrely, the latest trick seems to be starting the spam off by apologising, like that’ll make us leave that garbage there, since the scum were so pleasant).

    Excellent stuff.

  47. Posted September 18, 2007 at | Permalink

    @Baxter Tocher:

    I’m glad you like it, Baxter. I find it really takes the ‘chore’ out of searching for false spam. For a lot of people that isn’t that big of a deal, but I find that for me there are always a few comments that get marked as spam — especially my own.

  48. Posted October 09, 2007 at | Permalink

    Hi,

    The script only works in English.
    I’ve posted a hack at http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/7037

  49. Posted October 12, 2007 at | Permalink

    As you know, I’ve blogged about Auntie on several occasions, but one thing about WordPress that continues to bug me is that even though I blacklisted certain words in Discussion options so that comments containing those words should be deleted automatically I seem to still see them in Akismet. Is it that Akismet traps comments before WordPress gets a chance to kick in with its blacklist. If so, is there a a way around this, I’d rather get rid of them rightaway and only have a page or two of Auntie’s comments to scroll through rather than the daily 6 or 7 that Akismet captures.

    Any thoughts?

    db

  50. Posted October 12, 2007 at | Permalink

    @David Bradley:

    I’ve sent a bug about this before. My experience is that it only seems to catch keywords in the body of the text, not in the name, email, and url like they indicate in the configuration page.

  51. Posted October 12, 2007 at | Permalink

    That *would* explain it. It would also explain why it doesn’t seem to work as an IP blocker either.

    It would be nice if it could be fixed even with Auntie watching over me, it’s still a pain to have to scroll through pages of comments spams (actually most days I don’t, I just delete them all in one fell swoop)

    db

  52. Posted October 14, 2007 at | Permalink

    Howdy. I’ve been trying to use the newest version. However, it loads without any spam. Then it seems to start reading the spam on the server, and takes forever on dial-up. I’ve never had it finish and finally had to disable it.

    A couple of times, Auntie Spam said there was one number of spam and Akismet said there were other numbers (I have screenshots)

    Is it a problem just for us on dial-up? The earlier versions worked fine.

  53. Posted November 09, 2007 at | Permalink

    @David: the blacklist feature in WP merely flags comments as spam, it doesn’t auto-delete them. This has always been the case. That’s why they show up in Akismet/AuntieSpam.

    @engtech: With Auntie 2.04, I don’t see the checkbox for flagging a comment as not-spam. Is it just me, or is it a bug?

  54. Posted November 14, 2007 at | Permalink

    I have the problem of having my own comments on my own personal blog getting marked as spam. I always thought that was strange. But this has seemed to fix that! Thanks!

  55. Posted November 14, 2007 at | Permalink

    @trademark search:

    It’s probably because your using the text ‘trademark search’ to go the secureyourtrademark.com website.

    I’m still not sure if your comment is real or spam and wondering if I should mark it as spam.

  56. Posted November 15, 2007 at | Permalink

    2007/11/15 version 2.06
    - optimized, optimized, optimized
    - only displays 5000 comments per page to avoid stressing slower computers
    - will work for any language (not just english anymore)
    - any additional slowness is because of a bug on the WordPress end that makes you download the same spam over and over again: http://dev.wp-plugins.org/ticket/722
    - my home PC can download and display 5000 spam in 30 seconds

  57. Posted November 15, 2007 at | Permalink

    @Pascal Van Hecke:

    Thanks for reporting that bug. I’ve removed my dependence on English text in the new version (2.06). Let me know if you have any problems with it.

  58. Posted November 15, 2007 at | Permalink

    @Dougal Campbell:

    http://i115.photobucket.com/albums/n296/engtechwp/screenshots/akismet-auntie-spam-05-see-more-to-.png

    In order to flag a comment as non-spam you have to first click on the “# comments” link. It lets me squeeze more on to one page. :)

  59. Posted November 15, 2007 at | Permalink

    @mpb:

    I’ve released a new version 2.06 of Auntie Spam that is much faster. It may still be slow on dial-up because of the sheer amount of spam that has to be downloaded in some cases.

    The different numbers is WordPress’ fault. I go by the number in the dashboard tab to start with, and then switch to the actual amount of spam comments I found once it’s done. I find they’re always off by a few.

  60. Posted November 15, 2007 at | Permalink

    Thanks for your plugin, it’s a big timesaver! I was wondering if it’d be possible to tweak this a little to get it to work with GreaseKit for Safari. I tried, and it *almost* wants to work but not quite. (The first page loads up without any special Auntie Spam-related markup, but then when you delete all your spam you get the IDT logo-box.)

  61. Posted November 15, 2007 at | Permalink

    Many thanks. I tested it here which had only the one spam (but multi-tasking on e-mail, Firefox multi=tabs, Opera multi-tabs, GreatNews, etc.) Doesn’t sound like an improvement, perhaps, but it truly is for me. (My WordPs are next.)

    “Auntie took 29.156 seconds to download and display 1 spam comments.”
    http://cerebraloddjobs.edublogs.org/ wp-admin/edit-comments.php?page=akismet-admin

  62. Posted November 15, 2007 at | Permalink

    2007/11/15 version 2.07
    - bug fix: improved slowness of displaying hidden comments
    - added menu option for checking for updates right now
    - added menu option for configuring how much spam to download at a time for modem users

  63. Posted November 16, 2007 at | Permalink

    2.07 has an undefined “crashme” in auntieDownloadSpam(). Apart from that both 2.06 and 2.07 don’t work for me anymore. It doesn’t download an spam comments at all, it always says “Auntie Spam has put 0% of …”.

    Also, you probably should rethink the AdminSSL work-around. It kind of defeats the purpose of AdminSSL when admins start accessing non-SSL pages again.
    Besides, I use a different strategy for securing the admin area. My admin pages can only be accessed via HTTPS. That means I have to change your script code every time you release a new version.

    One more thing: The links in auntiePager() won’t work if WP isn’t installed top-level.

  64. Posted November 16, 2007 at | Permalink

    @Juergen Kreileder:

    gah. That was dumb of me. I’ve releases 2.08 that fixes the crashme bug I left in while I was debugging yesterday.

    I’ve added a menu function that lets you permanently toggle between http or https for accessing since what’s needed for your workaround… it’s going to have to be a manual set once fix because AdminSSL needs for it to be http instead of https to work (althought… maybe not anymore since I’ve switch from using the greasemonkey xmlhttprequest to the browser xmlhttprequest).

    http://userscripts.org/scripts/source/7037.user.js

    Try it out, let me know what you think.

  65. Posted November 16, 2007 at | Permalink

    2007/11/15 version 2.08
    - bug fix: fixed a stupid debug statement that was breaking 2.07
    - added menu option for switching between HTTP and HTTPS for accessing Auntie Spam

  66. Posted November 16, 2007 at | Permalink

    Thanks for the HTTPS thing!

    There’s still one link in auntiePager() that has a hardcoded wpadmin path.

    And I found the reason why it didn’t display any comments: You look for id=’comment-(\d+)’ but vanilla WordPress 2.3.1 seems to use ” instead of ‘.
    Matching id=['"]comment-(\d+)['"] fixes the problem for me.
    (That’s a ‘ followed by a ” in the square brackets)

  67. Posted November 16, 2007 at | Permalink

    @Juergen Kreileder:

    Thanks so much for finding these problems so quickly.

    http://userscripts.org/scripts/source/7037.user.js

    Both probs fixed and 2.09 is released.

  68. Posted November 18, 2007 at | Permalink

    I love your script!

    I just upgraded the script to 2.09 and found two problems:

    - I had to change the “included pages” to:
    http*://*/wp-admin/admin.php?page=akismet-admi*
    I think it was set to “edit-comments.php” instead of “admin.php”

    - The IP addresses are no longer shown. I usually take the IP addresses of the people/bots who’ve submitted 20+ spam comments and exclude their IPs completely from my site.

    I run WordPress 2.3.1, the current version as I’m writing this.

    Cheers from Vancouver,
    Jan

  69. Posted November 18, 2007 at | Permalink

    @Jan Karlsbjerg:

    http://userscripts.org/scripts/source/7037.user.js

    IP addresses are displayed again, and admin.php was included to the list of URLs. :)

  70. Posted November 18, 2007 at | Permalink

    Thanks! Love the quick turn-around, too. :-)

  71. Will
    Posted December 05, 2007 at | Permalink

    I was wondering if this seems correct. This is the second time I have tried Auntie Spam and the same thing happens. I see people talking about red lines, yellow lines, and first lines, but I never see any lines. It will tell me that there are ‘x’ number of spam comments, but nothing is ever shown. Is this OK?

  72. Posted December 05, 2007 at | Permalink

    @Will:

    That’s strange — you should be seeing some kind of list of spam.

    How much spam do you have?

    What version of WordPress are you using?

  73. Will
    Posted December 06, 2007 at | Permalink

    I re-read the information from above. Maybe the quote pasted below is why? Does it not even make a list if A.S. thinks the spam is “obvious”?

    “Completely hide obvious spam.”

    The below is the message A.S. gives this morning. There are 43 spams in the Akismet que since last night. And indeed A.S. seems to know that as a bit further down the page is this: “There are currently 43 comments identified as spam.”

    But there is no way for me to see any of them, even just a list or anything, unless I remove A.S. Maybe I am missing something obvious? It has been known to happen!

    I could attach a screen shot to an email if necessary.

    I use WordPress 2.3.1

  74. Will
    Posted December 06, 2007 at | Permalink

    Sorry I forgot to paste the A.S, message into the last comment. Here it is:

    Auntie Spam has put 0% of your spam comments on one page. She is only showing you the first line of the comments.

    Click on the ‘1 comments’ link to show the full comment (including the option to mark it as not-spam).

    Hit Ctrl+F to search or use Edit >> Find

    Auntie took 1.531 seconds to download and display 0 spam comments.

  75. Will
    Posted December 07, 2007 at | Permalink

    Hi Engtech - Do you have any ideas on this. I have let the spam build up to higher numbers, but it is the same thing. Nothing displayed.

    Thanks!

  76. Posted December 11, 2007 at | Permalink

    Well I let the spam build up to the hundreds and AS still did not display a list. I uninstalled the script and went back to the WP interface. I’ll check again in a few months. Maybe the third attempt will be the one.

  77. Posted February 09, 2008 at | Permalink

    Doesn’t work for me either, it shows no spam comments at all. WordPress is 2.3.2, Akismet is 2.1.3

  78. Posted February 10, 2008 at | Permalink

    @ Jeriko:

    It should work with that version of WordPress. It’s likely a problem with either a conflicting plugin (plugins that make your wp-admin use https can cause issues, as can renaming your wp-admin directory) or a language encoding thing.

    Although, I thought I worked out the language encoding bugs a while ago.

  79. Posted February 10, 2008 at | Permalink

    @engtech: Ah, the WP AJAX Edit Comments plugin interferes with Auntie Spam. I guess I have to turn it off when I’m checking my spam now. Maybe you could look into it? :-)

  80. Posted February 10, 2008 at | Permalink

    @ Jeriko:

    Sorry man, it’s kind of a black hole for trying to get it to work with all of the plugins out there. Only so much time in the day.

  81. Posted February 13, 2008 at | Permalink

    Duh, my bad. If Inline Comment Editing in the Admin Panel is turned off (WP AJAX Edit Comments Options), Auntie Spam works like a charm. Sorry to bother you :-)

  82. Posted March 23, 2008 at | Permalink

    Any idea if/when this will be usable with WordPress 2.5?

  83. Posted March 24, 2008 at | Permalink

    @ Chris:

    I’m waiting for 2.5 to be officially released before I update it. Once WordPress.com switches to the 2.5 interface then I’ll start updating the script.

  84. Posted March 24, 2008 at | Permalink

    A lot of people seem to be running the RC, including myself. Also, it does appear that 2.5 is going to be released soon. So why not go ahead and update the script?

  85. Posted March 25, 2008 at | Permalink

    @ Chris:

    Because my blog is running on WordPress.com.

    So I would have to download and install the RC candidate as well as a LAMP stack to run it.

    Then I would have to generate a couple of thousand fake spams on my fake blog so that there’s something in Akismet.

    It’s open source, why not send a patch if it’s really bugging you?

    I can’t update the script until I have a blog with spam running WordPress 2.5 to see what the differences are.

  86. Posted March 26, 2008 at | Permalink

    Sorry for bothering you.

  87. Posted March 29, 2008 at | Permalink

    WordPress 2.5 support will be added mid-April.

    Unfortunately I run on WordPress.com, not self-hosted WordPress and I’m stuck here in pre-2.5 land until they do the update so I can’t fix any of my scripts/programs that break with 2.5.

  88. Posted March 31, 2008 at | Permalink

    When I upgraded to WP 2.5, I was disappointed to found out that Akismet Auntie Spam doesn’t work.

    Glad to know that you’ll be updating it soon. Looking forward to the WP 2.5 version of Akismet Auntie Spam. Keep up the good work! :D

  89. Posted April 01, 2008 at | Permalink

    @ jaypee:

    http://userscripts.org/scripts/source/7037.user.js

    Auntie Spam 2.20 with WP 2.5 support (still backwards compatible to 2.3)

  90. Posted April 01, 2008 at | Permalink

    Thanks a lot! Just downloaded and installed it. :D

  91. Posted April 09, 2008 at | Permalink

    Hi. Slight problem to report - I can’t despam genuine comments on wordpress.com using the latest version. The javascript to expand the comment and show the despam checkbox simply isn’t running.

  92. Posted April 09, 2008 at | Permalink

    @ tigtog:

    Got it working again. Here you go:

    http://userscripts.org/scripts/source/7037.user.js

  93. Posted April 10, 2008 at | Permalink

    Hey, that was fast! Thank you, I love this application.

  94. Posted April 10, 2008 at | Permalink

    this is a lifesaver for me, thanks alot and thanks to Lorelle for mentioning this in her WordCamp 2008 presentation this works like a charm.

  95. Posted April 11, 2008 at | Permalink

    GREAT APP! Have added it, and look forward to looking at my spam/deleting junk in this way (well I would rather there be no spam but as if that will ever happen)

    Just one question though….. In one of your images above you wrote:

    “3 spam comments from the same IP address”

    … does that mean if I did not have this script installed, AKISMET would have only showed me one and just added the total count.

    For example I got 5 spam currently removed by akismet. Then I get one spam comment and it goes up to 8. THat means the other 2 were the exact same (and from the same IP address) then they wont show up. But with your script they indicate that they do?

    If that is how it is (either that or I misunderstood the picture) that is excellent!!! Thank you so much for the script.

    Keep up the great work!
    Cheers :)

  96. Posted April 11, 2008 at | Permalink

    @ pKay:

    pKay,

    You’ve misunderstood the picture :) You have it backwards, actually.

    Akismet will always show each spam by itself.

    “For example I got 5 spam currently removed by akismet. Then I get one
    spam comment and it goes up to 8. THat means the other 2 were the
    exact same (and from the same IP address) then they wont show up. But
    with your script they indicate that they do?”

    No, that’s not how Akismet works. If you have 5 spam, and you get 1
    more, then you have 6 spam, not 8. The reason it might say 8 is
    because it hides spam on posts older than about 15 days.

    So you have 6 spams in Akismet, with 3 unique IP addresses between
    them (the other 3 have the same IP address).

    With Akismet, you’ll see 6 spams.

    With Auntie Spam, you’ll see 3 spams, because it groups them by IP address.

    Auntie Spam doesn’t do anything with those 2 missing spam on the 15
    day old posts; there isn’t any way to access them no matter what
    you’re using.

  97. Posted April 11, 2008 at | Permalink

    AH my bad! Sorry, it is a bit late and I obviously need some sleep before I utter anything else that makes zero sense!

    Thank you for clearing it up for me :)

    Kind regards :)
    pKay.

  98. Posted April 11, 2008 at | Permalink

    I’m still having problems that I think are 2.5 related (based on when they started). It’s hanging on “Downloading __ comments in one go.” I’ve downloaded the latest version. Is this a problem that others have had?

  99. Posted May 13, 2008 at | Permalink

    Well I am back after many months to try Auntie Spam again. You can see the trouble I had in mine and Engtech’s comments on Dec 5th through 11th, 2007.

    I am with a new host and on a newer version of WP. Still the same problem with Auntie Spam not displaying a list at all. the only thing that is the same as back in December is my theme, so I am thinking AS must not work will some themes.

    The theme I am using has an unusual headerphp file, so maybe that is the problem?

9 Trackbacks

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