Like the startling discovery that your car’s odometer has just turned over 100,000, today I hit the delete comment spam button on my Akismet panel on this WordPress.com blog and found this:
Akismet killed 50,000 comment spams on my blog since it began in October of 2005. Incredible.
Overall, the false-positive ratio for Akismet catching “good” comments on this blog has been almost insignificant. I find maybe 3-5 posts a month falsely identified. And less as time goes on, since it is learning by our actions.
Hugs, kisses, and the famous relle dance for all who have worked and continue to work on Akismet to protect bloggers from comment spammers. Thank you, thank you, thank you!
Site Search Tags: akismet, comment spam, spammers, comment spam fighting, fight comment spam, stopping comment spam, blog spammers
Copyright Lorelle VanFossen, member of the 9Rules Network
Lorelle on WordPress 
22 Comments
You should put the new Akismet widget (neé accessory) in your sidebar.
Happy now? 😉
50,000. Thats alot of spam. Hopefully each and every sender of that crap gets what they deserve.
Where do I find the new Akismet widget (neé accessory)?
The Sidebar Widgets, which I call “sidebar accessories”, are available on WordPress.com blogs only on WordPress Themes with Widgets enabled. A lot of the Themes are enabled, but not all yet. If the Theme you are using is enabled, go to Presentation > Sidebar Widgets and look towards the bottom of the panel. There are some nondescript boxes you can click and drag to put onto your “sidebar” examples above. One is labeled Akismet. Click and drag it to where you want it.
There is also a Sidebar Widgets WordPress Plugin for full version WordPress blogs.
For more information, see Playing with WordPress.com New Sidebar Widgets.
It’s actually bundled with the latest version of the Akismet plugin, just not announced yet. (You heard it here first.) It’s already available here on WordPress.com.
that’s a whole lot.
nonetheless, 3 or 4 false positives a month can be quite a pain depending on who they’re from. random google surfers? meh. immediate family members? akismet’s lucky it’s still activated. but i check its work zealously.
That’s awesome! That’s a real indicator of just how popular your blog really is! When you commented to me earlier that you used Askimet, I hadn’t realized just how much… I assumed it was pretty high, but I didn’t realize it was 50,000 in less than a year!
I’m waiting for my Akismet spamodometer to hit 300,000 since I first installed Akismet on December 27, 2005. I had it deinstalled for a while, but it seems to have maintained its counter. Today (September 27, 2006), the spamodometer reads 231,419 spam caught.
David: Wow! My discovering the 50,000 mark was such a fluke. I usually pay no attention but the number jumped right off the screen at me. And in the few hours since I posted this announcement, 500 more comment spams have been slaughtered by Akismet. They are really hitting hard in the past few days. Luckily, almost none get through. With the recent crush of comment spam, you should reach your target number faster than you might think!
Stephane: Trust me, the number of comment spams that hit a blog has nothing to do with web traffic (popularity).
The system of how many you get is something I haven’t figured out yet, except that I’ve found that the more incoming links, the faster comment spammers find you. From there, it’s highly possible 10,000 of the 50,000 comments spams targeted only 1-5 posts. That’s how they hit on a couple of my other blogs. They seem to find one they like and hammer it. When a post continues to get hammered repeatedly over time, I close comments on that one post for a while. That slows them down for a bit. It has nothing to do with blog popularity. I wish it was that easy. 😉 Luckily, this is the number of caught comment spam, so my reader’s don’t have to deal with comments selling p0rn, sex, drugs, gambling, and other evils.
In order to post a comment at the ALLDERBLOB, the person making the comment has to be a “registered user” amd all comments are moderated by the administrator. In other words, nothing but real comments get through.
Even so, most of the “comments” are from one source, which arin.net can trace. I know who all my registered users are. None of them is posting this spam. How is it getting past the registration requirement of my site?
Any thoughts? I’d appreciate it.
50.000? Wow, that means I can expect a lot more junk which -fortunately- will be captured by Akismet. I had over 200 in the last 5 or 6 days. Glad to see we have Akismet to hold the fortress. 😉
Blobby: Personally, I and a majority of users believe that forcing users to log in hurts your blog, and it really doesn’t stop comment spam that is determined, as you’ve discovered. Some comment spam comes from humans, a new phenomenon which makes battle comment spam harder. So why hurt your blog when it’s easy with top notch comment spam fighting tools to avoid comment spam almost totally?
As for tracking someone down, why bother? Ban them and be done with it. If you really want to know, check out One Stop Shopping for DNS Stuff.
my akismet has caught more than 13 500 spams since i install the plugin.
Well, two weeks after switching, I’ve had 8 comment spams, which is more than I had in a year at Blogger. I’ve also had 2 false positives, both of which were me, logged in as admin.
It’s great that it stops it, it’s a shame that it’s necessary. WP is better than blogger in so many ways, but the captchas meant I just didn’t have an issue with blogger. Ah well.
Well, these two weeks have put Akismet and every spam blocking program to the test more than it has in ages. I made the 50,000 announcement YESTERDAY. Have you looked at the Akismet counter at the bottom of my sidebar today? Right now, it’s over 52,000. I’ve had 2,000 comment spam hits in one day. With those kinds of smacks, some are going to slip through as they are overwhelming the system. If I’ve got 2,000 comment spams, coming in so fast that I hit Delete All and there are 4 waiting for me on the page reload, and there are almost 300,000 bloggers on WordPress.com getting smacked, too, that’s a lot of comment spam hits.
Captchas have been beaten. They are annoying to users, some of whom will not comment on blogs with captchas or registration. It takes time, and right now, WordPress.com and other blogs are getting hammered. It will die down, I hope, soon.
I clicked past 21,000 filtered spam messages the other day, such an amazing product.
Al.
I’m currently pushing 550,085 spams killed…
I’ve only killed 2 spams since I installed Akismet last week. I guess my blog just isn’t very popular. Sob.
Again, I’ll repeat myself. The number of comment spam you get is not related to your blog’s popularity. Some days my main site gets 1-2 comment spams if any. Other days, I will suddenly have 160 in two hours. There is no predicting and it has no relationship to an increase, decrease, or anything with my blog traffic.
Comment spam bots do follow incoming links from other blogs them have spammed, so the more incoming links you have, whether or not they bring traffic, can increase your comment spam numbers. The more intrasite links you have can also increase your comment spam numbers as comment spam bots move from post to post through your site leaving crap all over the place.
I’ve had no comment spam in two or three months on my main site except on two posts that got hammered repeatedly. I finally closed comments on those two posts and the comment spam stopped for a while.
How they choose, why they choose, and what goes on in their demented minds is something I haven’t yet understood.
By the way, I recently ran across a blog (not a WordPress driven blog) with over 50 comment spams on one post marketing all things sex, casino, and drugs. It read like my Akismet spam catching panel. I jumped off that blog immediately, even though I know they had information I wanted to read. I didn’t want to read a blog with an author who didn’t care about their readers enough to remove the comment spam.
I moved away from WordPress (stupid move I know) for awhile to try Joomla and had to close comments altogether as no one had a decent comment spam system. So when I set up my blog again, I purchased a Pro Blogger Askimet annual subscription. In 14 days it caught more than 1,500 spam comments with no fallse positives on three of my blogs.
Looks like you hit 100,000 today!
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[…] Akismet blows away thousands of comment spam weekly on this blog. Recently, Akismet’s total comment spams fought off since it was installed on this blog hit 50,000 caught comment spams, and a few days ago, I found it caught 1399 comment spams in one day! That’s impressive comment spam fighting stuff. […]
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