WordPress MU

Hi everyone,
i'm using the latest version (2.2.7) of the Akismet plugin on my MU installation, together with my API key configured in wp-config as WPCOM_API_KEY. However, for some reason Akismet sees lots of comments as spam and places them in the spam que, and i can't really figure out why. Is anyone familiar with this problem and knows if there is some way to fix it?

Have you contacted Akismet for approval for such usage? They consider it to be commercial (edit: Enterprise maybe a better term) usage and require either purchasing a plan or usage in exchange for linkage back.

http://akismet.com/commercial/

Andrea wrote up a decent how to on preventing spam comments. Please give it a read:

http://wpmututorials.com/how-to/stopping-spam-comments-sitewide/

While we use our own inhouse solution based on Spam Assassin, for offsite solutions, Typepad's Antispam solution works fine. And it's free:

http://antispam.typepad.com

Other solutions are discussed in the comments in Andrea's post there.

Thanks! I was thinking the commercial API key might be the problem, however i can't find any indication in the interface that is saying that i'm submitting many comments, etc. Also, i don't have the problem on the test server (which uses the same setup) which is identical to the production server.

I'll check out your other links. Thanks again!

Answering my own question: this problem was created because of the setup of the servers. Original requests were forwarded to separate PHP 'workers', and were stripped of the original, originating IP. That IP was added though in a separate 'HTTP_X_FORWARDED_HOST' header.

I've made a patch for Akismet in WordPress trac. If you have this problem you might want to use that patch on the plugin.

http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/11938

Huskyr, did you get this to work? I tried applying your patch to my site's Akismet (which has the same problem, needing to see the x forwarded ip), but it didn't work.

How about the other suggestion made further up? Have you obtained permission to run it on your site?