DaveN brought up a good point on Strikepoint today. Akismet should really have a local whitelist that you can set to whitelist people to comment or trackback. Here’s a quick 15-minute hack. Let me know if its ok and I’ll polish it a bit.
This allows you to add trusted domains or email addresses that you wanto to bypass Akismet. This does not mean they will be auto-approved, but they will bypass Akismet. This method is not perfect and can easily be spoofed. It does, however, prevent the annoyance of having to dig through the Akismet spam folder to approve someone who is always marked as spam.
You can put in a domain to match the poster’s URL or an email address.
ie:
shoemoney.com
david@dellanave.com
That would whitelist any email@shoemoney.com, as well as any author URL of shoemoney.com, OR an email address of david@dellanave.com.
As commented below, this is trivial to spoof. However, since your whitelist is unknown to the public, it would be difficult or time consuming for a spammer to analyze which “magic words” allow it to bypass Akismet.
November 27th, 2006 at 4:01 pm
[...] On Strikepoint DaveN also talked about Akismet… Dillsmack wrote a whitelist in case you want to whitelist people from Akismet. Check it out on his blog [...]
November 28th, 2006 at 8:23 am
the download link doesn’t work…
November 28th, 2006 at 9:14 pm
OK - I downloaded and replaced the akismet.php file. In the akismet config panel now there is a “Akismet Whitelist - E-Mails or Domain Name”
I put in just the domain name? dellanave.com or do i need the http, yada yada yada
Also, do I need to comma separate. or just Return (enter) after each?
November 28th, 2006 at 9:42 pm
Basically you can put in a domain to match the poster’s URL or an email address.
ie:
shoemoney.com
david@dellanave.com
That would whitelist any email@shoemoney.com, as well as any author URL of shoemoney.com, OR an email address of david@dellanave.com. Make sense?
November 28th, 2006 at 11:35 pm
I think I got it Dave. Thanks!
November 29th, 2006 at 2:03 pm
Thanks ‘dellanave’. To keep in mind, this whitelists based on the submitted comment_author_url and comment_author_email fields. Since there is no verification going on, a spammer can simply blog spam as shoemoney (for example) and stuff the spam URLs into the comment body.
So you still need to remain diligent, but thanks to this effort you don’t need to go digging thru the akismet trash.
December 29th, 2006 at 8:11 am
[...] Akismet - I heart Matt and the rest of the Wordpress crew for coming up with Akismet. I’ve gotten 829 spam comments (vs. 220 real comments) since this blog launched and Akismet has filtered out 99% of spam properly with just a few false positives and false negatives. I hope they add a local whitelist in 2007. There’s a hack by Dillsmack if you need one. [...]
January 26th, 2007 at 1:39 pm
[...] If you are banned from Akismet or just never see your comment contact me and I will whitelist you with dillsmacks akismet whitelist scriptoid wordpress plugin Hi - I was interested in advertising on this site, but I would rather pay for a review of my site posted here as a blog entry. My site is related and the review could be negative or positive, but is this something you do? If you’re interested I would like to discuss this more with you. [...]
April 23rd, 2007 at 5:40 pm
[...] Dellanave » Akismet With Local Whitelist “This allows you to add trusted domains or email addresses that you want to bypass Akismet. This does not mean they will be auto-approved, but they will bypass Akismet.” (tags: akismet blogging plugins wordpress todo important) [...]
July 7th, 2007 at 12:23 am
hello. this is totally what i need. will you ever update it to the latest akismet?
(i use 2.0.2 which has drastically reduced the spam that gets thru, your plugin uses the old 1.2.something)
that would be great and extremely useful!
thanks in advance
March 13th, 2008 at 3:14 pm
Thanks a million … just had a commenter show up on my site who’s comments always go to spam for no freaking reason. This is exactly what I was hoping to find!