A quiz met
May 19th, 2006 2:42:29 pm pst by 
Sterling Camden
It sounds like Alec Saunders is experiencing the same Akismet ecstasy that I am. Chris Pirillo, though, not quite as excited. Chris reports massive false positives. What could be up with that? I haven’t had one false positive in hundreds of spomments caught. There aren’t any configuration parameters, so it would be hard for it to be something Chris did in setting it up. I don’t know how Akismet works, but perhaps there is some text being analyzed from Chris’ site that is always considered spammish? Or maybe it was a momentary failure of the Akismet service? Any other ideas?
BTW, Chris, I like your new site design. And good job moving to WordPress.
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Yup. In just over 24 hours it has trapped 939 pieces of comment spam with NO FALSE POSITIVES.
I am truly impressed.
There is some real intelligence in that algorithm, without a doubt. Some of the messages it catches I look at and say to myself, “I know it’s SPAM, but exactly HOW do I know it’s SPAM — and how does Akismet know?”
Thanks for reading and commenting, Alec.
I’m baffled.
Me, too, Chris (thanks for stopping by). Maybe Matt Mullenweg will drop by with some insights. Have you asked the forums?
I mentioned this false positive issue to Matt at Northern Voice. Akismet erroneously flags IRC logs and blockquoted IM chat as spam too.
Thanks, TDavid. Hopefully Matt can figure out what’s going on with Chris’ site before Chris gets uber-spammed like I did pre-Akismet. As popular as Pirillo’s site is, you’d expect a much bigger flood than the deluge that drowned me for a day.