This week, Akismet reported that it had blocked its 100,000th spam comment on my site/blog. While that’s not a remarkable number, in light of how little traffic my site gets that figure becomes somewhat more significant. Since this site has only been around for just over one and a half years (19 months), that works out to roughly 5200 spam comments every month, or a little over 1300 every week. Note that the current averages are actually much higher since in the beginning I got a lot less spam before the bots discovered my site.
Props definitely go out to Automattic for creating such a reliable and accurate service. When I first wrote about it over a year ago, I was very impressed with its precise filtering of spam and non-spam (aka ham) comments along with its unobtrusiveness. Akismet truly makes spam filtering transparent to the end user, unlike other methods such as CAPTCHAs.
Of course, I can’t forget thanking the developers of WordPress as well. Without them, I would have no site from which I’d have to protect from spam. ๐
Check back later when this site surpasses the 1,000,000 mark for spam.
Pete… gosh, spam has gotten bad. I received a spam text message on my cell phone last month. That one really floored me.
Yeah, the spammers have to continue to “innovate”, since most e-mail filters have become good enough to reduce it to near-zero levels. So, the spammers look for new mediums…
I can tolerate spam on my blog and areas like that because for the most part it’s non-intrusive and automatically dealt with. But spam on your cellphone? Yeah, that is just intrusive… worse than telemarketing.
Who thought that you could piss someone off into buying your products?