Is Akismet broken again?

In the past 24 hours I’ve seen a wave of comment spam resembling the late August outage. Mostly porn spam. Is it just me? I’m using the Akismet API from my homebrew code (negatives are simply rejected), but maybe this is a sign that I should start using the feedback part of their API to report false negatives.

This also gets me thinking about the need for an Akismet-like service that is run cooperatively, with multiple servers to avoid the single-point-of-failure problem. (And maybe more liberal licensing.) I think Akismet is cool; it’s just impossible not to think about The Next Cool Thing once the Current Thing starts giving you trouble.

Update, 2006-09-18: Akismet does seem to be working again now. I still just trash any comment it thinks is spam (along with displaying a notice), but I added some logging to track the action better.

Heliologue commented on Thu Sep 14 13:45:23 2006:

It’s not just you. I’m having the same problem. But it’s apparently not so severe or widespread as the August outage, because I haven’t seen very many people talking about it.

Paul commented on Thu Sep 14 13:53:05 2006:

Well, I’m glad it’s not just me – thanks. It may not be an outage at all, but the beginning of serious gaming by the spammers.

It’s foul stuff, too!