Downtime « Akismet
The stats code introduced yesterday had a bug which only triggered about 24 hours after it had launched. It kicked in for different blogs at different times, but the result was that starting sometime last night you probably started to see really obvious spam getting past your Akismet filters.All of our systems were up and running at the time, and spam was being correctly identified, which is why our monitoring systems didn’t notify us of the problem. However, there was extra junk being included with the response which broke the API call, which expects only “true” or “false”.
I’m really sorry about this, when things are working smoothly it’s easy to forget how much vile junk is actually being blocked day to day. I’m going to go through my blogs now and double-check that no spam actually got published, and I’d suggest other folks do the same. The “mass edit” mode under “Comments” should be useful for WordPress users.
I’ve also taken steps to make sure on the Akismet side this kind of error can’t happen again.
I came home from a quick vacation (Camping in Santa Cruz with a day at the Boardwalk and a day at Monterey Bay Aquarium, pictures coming) and found my DSL modem dead, won’t power up, and then a “bit” of spam to deal with. It had been so long since I had to, that it surpised me. Luckily you didn’t see it, since Bad Behavior caught most of it, and then some rules I have caught all but one. But when a a distributed service goes down, it affects everyone.
Tags: Interesting, Site Update, SPAM, Wordpress
How was the Vacation? You where talking about it before you left.