Weird Akismet Problem

None of these are newly installed, but here is the list.
Besides Akismet:

AIOSEO
Dagon Design Form Mailer
Dean’s Permalinks Migration
DoFollow
Feedburner Feed Replacement
Full Text Feed
KG Archives
Random Posts
runPHP
Search Docs
ShareThis Classic
Show Top Commentators
Simple Tags
SRG Clean Archives
Subscribe To Comments
wp-numly
WP-phpMyAdmin
WP AJAX Edit Comments

It has not happened since that I have seen. I now check all my Top Commentator Links before I delete Akismet spam, but I have not seen it happen again. I worry about it, but I am so glad I caught it before someone else clicked on it!

Well I figured this out and it is weird. Hopefully upgrading to 2.3.3 will fix this, but I am not so sure. Plan to so that this week, so it may be a mute point, but here is what happens just in case anyone else runs into it.

A spammer tries to put a comment on a post and Akismet catches it. The spammer’s name, let’s say “Tom”, (Bad Tom), is the same as the last legitimate person to comment on the post, “Tom”,(Good Tom), AND that legitimate commentator is listed in the Top Commentators plugin list.

What happens is the link in the top commentator list changes to the spammers link until I delete the spam comment from Akismet. Then the “Good Tom” in the Top Commentators list goes back to what it should be. None of Good Tom’s other links on my site go bad, only the one in the TC plugin list.

Don’t know much about this stuff, but I am guessing the bug is with the TC plugin and not Akismet?

Figured this out and it is not an Akismet problem but a WordPress one or A top Commentators plugin problem, depending on how you look at it.

The name that is displayed in WordPress when a person leaves a comment is not controlled in any way. I suppose registering might help, but I don’t think the display name of a registered user has to be unique.
What happens with the “Show Top Commentators” plugin is this. If “Bob” is in my Top Commentator list, the url for Bob is always the last url he used when posting a comment. This is the way STC works. A user does not have to have a unique name to post a comment in WordPress. The problem arises when “Bob” is in the top commentators list and then another Bob, spammer or legit does not matter, posts a comment. STC thinks the Bob that just posted the comment is the same Bob in the STC list and changes the outgoing link in the STC list to the link of the new Bob. So now the first Bob is on the STC list, but with a link to the second Bob’s url.