4.6 update stops Akismet from working

[Whitegoodshelp]

After updating to Wordpress 4.6 Akismet no longer works. It shows "Akismet can’t connect to your site.Your firewall may be blocking Akismet."

I have several Wordpress sites and only the ones I have just updated to 4.6 have this issue. The sites I have not updated have Akismet working fine so it seems very strong evidence that something in the 4.6 update is causing this issue.

[dd32]

Hi @Whitegoodshelp,

Are you by any chance also seeing PHP warnings related to curl_exec() or curl_init() being disabled?
Can you check to see if your PHP configuration has anything in the disable_functions setting?

[Whitegoodshelp]

Many thanks for a promt reply. I have the following

disable_functions = exec,passthru,shell_exec,system,proc_open,popen,curl_exec,curl_multi_exec,parse_ini_file,show_source,pcntl_exec

I seem to remember a while back it was recommended that I disable something to do with curl for security reasons. I think it was Plesk that recommended it but not sure. However, it's been like it for months and the other wordpress sites I have online that haven't been updated to 4.6 have Akismet working OK and they are still on the same server with same php?

Many thanks

Andy

[Whitegoodshelp]

I'm not seeing any warnings btw.

[Whitegoodshelp]

Screenshot

[SergeyBiryukov]

Replying to Whitegoodshelp:

Many thanks for a promt reply. I have the following

disable_functions = exec,passthru,shell_exec,system,proc_open,popen,curl_exec,curl_multi_exec,parse_ini_file,show_source,pcntl_exec

Thanks for the confirmation, we're already tracking this issue in #37700.