: Sudden connection problems with Akismet I've had the Akismet anti-spam plugin installed and working great on two of my non-commercial Wordpress blogs for the past couple of months. Both sites

@Gail5422790

I'm probably a little late with this, but I have had this happen to me FOUR different times on all 9 of my WordPress sites. Here is the answer that I got from my hosting company (InMotion Hosting) - this solution has worked every time, but for some reason the file keeps changing back - this last time they told me that they have "Locked" the file: "This was a very intricate issue that we had to take time to find and correct. What it appears is that your vps container did not receive some updates in regards to the resolv.conf file we made previously when we changed some of our DNS cluster servers. I manually adjusted this file to properly connect to our clusters. At this time, I was able to set up your akismet plugin properly. Additionally, this was effecting your ability to connect to wordpress.org and your general site speeds. The connection to wordpress.org has been corrected and your site load times have exponentially gone up."

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@Lee4591628

Akismet status was always showing as "up" during these problems.

As per other answer by Jospeh Scott and similar answers posted on the Wordpress Forum, it is suggested that this error is caused by a firewall or another problem on the server. My reliable hosting provider was very diligent in assisting me troubleshoot this and was unable to find anything wrong so I've ruled this out.

However, I'm using a free, unpaid API key (non-commercial sites) and this problem only happened on a day my key was getting slammed with spam. It seems reasonable to conclude that my API key was simply temporarily throttled.

As per this Akismet page:


Paid account perks


Priority over free accounts
Faster & more reliable
No traffic limits or throttles



Also, there is no error message contained in the Akismet plugin specific to throttling a non-paid account. A generic connection error message seems like it would be the next best thing.

Since installing a reCaptcha module, thereby reducing the number of API calls to Akismet, the error has not returned.

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@Sarah324

You can track the uptime status of the Akismet API at status.automattic.com/9931/136079/Akismet-API
If the Akismet API is listed as up (it generally is, we have really good availability) then your hosting provider is in the best position to help track down why your WordPress site is no longer able to reach akismet.com.

We've found the two most common reasons for it not working are:


PHP is configured in such a way as to prevent HTTP requests from being made
A firewall or proxy server is blocking the out going HTTP requests

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