Derek Springer

Howdy, great question. Akismet’s default settings work well for most sites, so you’re in good shape right out of the box. That said, here are a few things worth a quick look:

1. Confirm your API key is verified — Go to Settings → Akismet Anti-spam and make sure it shows as connected.
2. Leave “Silently discard” unchecked for now — This lets you see everything Akismet catches while you’re getting started. You can turn it on later once you’re confident in the filtering.
3. Consider the privacy notice — If your site has visitors from the EU or you want to be transparent about spam filtering, enable the privacy notice option.
4. Check your spam folder in a few days — Go to Comments → Spam to see what Akismet is catching. If you spot any real comments there, click “Not Spam” to rescue them and help Akismet learn.

That’s it! Akismet handles the heavy lifting from here.

Yes! Go to Settings → Akismet Anti-spam and make sure the option to “Silently discard the most pervasive and egregious spam” is unchecked. That way, every suspicious comment stays in your Spam folder for you to review. Just remember to check it regularly, Akismet automatically cleans out the spam folder after 15 days. You can always click “Not Spam” to rescue any legitimate comments that were caught by mistake.

Howdy,

Thanks for the detailed info!

Why those submissions were flagged

The emails you mentioned ([email protected] and [email protected]) are almost certainly being correctly flagged. yopmail.com is a well-known disposable email provider, and [email protected] is a common placeholder address. Both patterns are overwhelmingly associated with spam across millions of sites. If these were your own test submissions, that explains it. Akismet evaluates each submission on its own merits and can’t distinguish your test data from a spammer’s fake data.

How Akismet evaluates submissions

Akismet’s classification runs server-side (not in the plugin), and it’s constantly learning from data across millions of sites. It looks at multiple signals holistically: email reputation, IP history, content, and patterns from known spam networks.

For future testing, you can use Akismet’s built-in test trigger instead of disposable emails: submit a form entry with the name, email, or message body set to akismet-guaranteed-spam (e.g., [email protected]). This will reliably get flagged so you can confirm Akismet is working without affecting your real data.

Gravity Forms + Akismet configuration

A few things to be aware of:

1. The Akismet add-on for Gravity Forms is now required for the integration to work. Akismet is configured per-form within Gravity Forms, so make sure it’s enabled and properly mapped on each form you want protected. More details in Gravity Forms’ Akismet docs: https://docs.gravityforms.com/category/add-ons-gravity-forms/akismet-add-on/
2. Reporting false positives is key. You’ve already done the right thing by marking legitimate submissions as “Not Spam” in Gravity Forms. That feedback goes directly back to Akismet and improves accuracy for your site and globally. You may need to keep doing this over a few days as Akismet continuously learns from the feedback.
3. Keep the Akismet plugin up to date. The spam-checking logic lives on our servers, but staying current gets you the latest integration improvements.

For more on how Akismet works with contact forms: https://akismet.com/support/getting-started/using-akismet-with-your-contact-forms/

In short: The flagged submissions look correctly identified based on the email addresses used. If you’re seeing real customer submissions incorrectly flagged, let us know and we’ll investigate.

Howdy @blacklodgebeer, thanks for the report. It might be possible that the recipe was cached with the previous settings. Try setting the cache value to to -1 (e.g. [beerxml recipe=http://example.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/bowie-brown.xml cache=-1) to clear the cache and see if that updates it.

Otherwise, can you give me some more details about the recipe/site that’s having the issue?

Howdy, thanks for the message @sprithansi, sorry for the late reply. There’s a handful of changes I plan on rolling into an update hopefully soon — I’ll add it to the list!

Howdy again @xaviermi,
As far as I’ve tested Hueman doesn’t seem to support infinite scroll via Jetpack. Is there some other infinite scroll plugin you’re using? It would also be helpful if you could let me know the site you’re having an issue with.

Generally speaking, we’ve noticed that loading posts via infinite scroll and inserting the ad code can cause race conditions in some themes. We’ve disabled loading additional ads via Jetpack’s infinite scroll plugin, but if you’re using another plugin that’s likely the cause.

Yeah, unfortunately it’s one of those annoying technical things about WordPress that’s preventing it since it’s a new taxonomy, but it’s pretty easy to fix. All you need to do is flush your rewrite rules by updating your permalinks settings.

Follow these steps to flush your rewrite rules:

* Navigate to your WordPress Admin panel and login
* Go to Settings->Permalinks
* Locate the “Save Changes” button at the bottom of the screen and click it.
* That’s it, you don’t actually need to make any changes to the settings here.

@gitarwmn yeah, I primarily made this plugin to allow authors to share their homebrew recipes on their blogs. I know the folks over at http://brulosophy.com/ do a good job of sharing their recipes (they use the BeerXML Shortcode too), so that’s a great place to check. Also, I typically post recipes on my own site too: https://www.fivebladesbrewing.com/homebrew-recipes/.

Good luck and happy brewing! 🍻