@notpoppy,
My sites lost connection to Akismet recently, my hosting provider tried all sorts of things to fix it. In the end it resolved on one site by updating to the current development version:
http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/akismet.zip
It seems to have regained connection now and I’m slowly working through the 3,000-plus spam comments still in the moderation queue.
I paid for Akismet, why am I still getting spam comments/posts on my site? Grrrr!!!
Marking as resolved. kpphotography, if you’d like to talk more about the spam you’re seeing, please start a new support thread.
Afraid we need to mark this as unresolved again as the problem has returned. Seems to be the same symptoms as before, only I’ve noticed it earlier so we’re talking about a few hundred comments rather than thousands.
(Have now marked as unresolved – didn’t see the menu at first!)
Have had the problem for ten hours now, over 4,000 comments in moderation and the admin areas of the site are virtually unusable.
I was able to get into the plugins section and, strangely, deactivating Akismet doesn’t seem to have any effect. New spam comments still go into moderation straight away – I didn’t think that would happen without Akismet. And the admin pages are still running really slowly.
So although I definitely still have the problem I’m less sure I understand it and now think it may be nothing to do with Akismet at all. If anyone can shed some light I’d be very grateful.
This has now degenerated to the point where the site is virtually unusable, both admin and public pages. Any help gratefully received.
It seems that regardless of whether Akismet is activated or not, all comments go into moderation, irrespective of whether they are legitimate or spam.
No, wait, I’m wrong:
When Akismet is activated, all comments go into moderation as ‘pending’.
When Akismet is not activated, obvious spam comments go into moderation as ‘pending’, most clean comments do not.
Still it appears in either scenario spam comments are not being put in the spam folder. The last ones that did so (which weren’t put there manually by me) were 16 hours ago, when the problem first began.
notpoppy: Is it possible that your API key has been suspended? That sounds like a possibility. Can you email support@akismet.com with your key so we can check on it?