Are you willing to let your blog go naked for one day? No, it isn’t time for CSS Naked Day. Mark on Akismet was intrigued by the announcement by Jesper Rønn-Jensen to turn off all comment spam protection on December 15, and now challenges all Akismet users to turn off Akismet for a day.
It’s easy to forget just how much anti-spam solutions help bloggers. It’s not just Akismet — there are many other methods from CAPTCHA to Spam Karma.
It was not so long ago that a blogger could wake to find a couple of hundred (or more) spam comments that arrived overnight. Deleting them not only took time but it also took some of the fun away from blogging.
You can pick December 15, or choose your own day – a day when you have lots of time on your hands to deal with all the comment spam that will flood your blog comments. If you do, Akismet wants to hear from you about your experience.
To give you some ideas about what you will be facing when the comment spam protection comes down, here is a screenshot of the chart on Akismet’s Spam Zeitgeist page. The orange area is comment spam. The little tiny blue/green area is good comments, they call “ham”.
Here are the stats and I’ve added the percentages:
Total spam: 3,662,998,863
Total ham: 320,216,342 (9%)
Today (UTC, 18 hours left)
Spam today: 2,992,297
Ham today: 513,436 (17%)
As of today, Akismet has caught 234,512 spam for me since it started in October 2005. In the past few months, I get 500 to 2,000 comment spam a day. Sometimes more, never less. Over 97% by my best guess are caught. Some days, it’s 100%, and other days maybe a few more slip by, but all are marked and submitted automatically to the great comment spam secret collection database hiding within Akismet’s great servers.
Here are my guessing game stats for comment spam on my blog:
- 15,310 good blog comments represent 7% of the total comments “attempted” on my blog.
- Divide up the number of comment spams across the past 26 months of blogging on WordPress.com, the average comment spam per month is 9,019.
- That’s an estimated guess of over 300 a day.
- And 167 per blog post.
This doesn’t count all the rest of my blogs. I’d be overwhelmed without Akismet.
Going through all the comment spam looking for false/positives was a nightmare of searching, made even worse by Akismet’s lazy and frustrating interface. Thank all the gods for Engtech’s Akismet Auntie-Spam Greasemonkey Script. Comment spam is still a bother, but it’s easier than ever to deal with it once Auntie is on board.
On WordPress.com, I cannot turn off Akismet, not even for a second. Would I do so on my other blogs?
Are you kidding! Do you think I’m that stupid? I have much better things to do with my time.
But if you would like to step back into the dark ages of only a couple years ago, then be my guest. See what it is like to read through long lists of sexual fantasies and fetishes, mortgage rate ads, drugs, car ads, and so many gross and disgusting entrails. Have a good time.
Me, I’m sticking with what works to keep my blog safe, and my readers safer.
Also check out It Really Is Spam? on Akismet. Mark explains what comment spam used to look like, and how it is grown with splogs and scrapers, including covering those annoying automatic scrapper Plugins which say “Fred said something interesting” when you and your blog aren’t Fred, and important points you need to know about including how the nofollow doesn’t work, comment spam/trackback spam association, spam economics, pingbacks/trackbacks and content theft, and how Akismet works best when we all work together.
Site Search Tags: comment spam, sploggers, scrapers, trackback spam, akismet, turn off akismet 
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Copyright Lorelle VanFossen, member of the 9Rules Network, and author of Blogging Tips, What Bloggers Won't Tell You About Blogging.
Lorelle on WordPress 
65 Comments
Agreed. I’m more than happy to provide any comment spam statistics back to Akismet if they are interested; however, even with a blog such as mine, that has a small audience, I still get mountains of comment spam nearly of which is caught by Akismet. To turn it off, even for a couple of hours, would let in a flood of nonsense about replica rolex watches, ringtones, and inappropriate material. Thank God for Akismet and other similar products. If it weren’t for them, I think I would have given up on blogging due to pure comment spam frustration.
Haha, I’m doing it. December 15, I’m turning my Akismet off.
yeah for Akismet!!
While spam hasn’t yet been a large problem for me, it has caught about 25 spam comments since I started using WordPress a few months ago. Nothing outstanding, but in time I’m sure it would be more trouble. Akismet stays active on any WP installation … heck, if I could I’d have it be a pre-installed plug! Who needs “Hey Dolly” when Akismet is more productive?!
I think I’ll pass on this one. I already know how much stuff Akismet blocks and I think that this is a great plug-in. I contribute $5 per month for this service and I know that it repays me many times over.
I am in!
This is a useless exercise. To see how much Akismet is helping you just look at your spam statistics. This is like asking diabetics to lay off insulin for a few days to remind them of what life would be like without it.
I do appreciate the free use of Akismet on my obscure little blog. But I know that its owners are making a bundle of money off it. That’s why I don’t feel the need to kiss the hem of their garments.
I think I’ll pass on this one Lorelle. There is this spam that whenever it enter’s my blog, undected by akismet, it renders my site with a blank white page with a number 54 on it. And it takes a week before it disappears. I’ve already experimented on this phenomenon and whenever I trunk off my akismet. It always happens.
So no thanks for the idea. But thanks though for the information. It is really interesting.
Even with Akismet installed there is still far too much spam that you have to deal with… the solution is to outright delete most of it right away using another plugin in addition to Akismet. Simple Spam Filter
I personally use a similar plugin that I wrote myself… but this plugin just blocks the really obvious spam outright, which saves your server processing time since it doesn’t have to send everything to Akismet.
Oh heck no! I’ve gotten VERY used to not having to deal with comment spam. Spam Karma 2 with the Akismet plugin has been fantastic. I moderate a comment maybe once a week. SK2 happily informs Akismet of ham/spam, and I can’t remember the last time I had a false positive. To date my ratio is 1 legit comment for every 30 spam (My spam total crossed 30,000 today)
I dunno.
So far, the jury is out on whether Akismet deals well with splogs and scrapers. I use a Spam Karma 2 and Akismet combo, but neither does a good job blocking or moderating bogus pingbacks. The inability to send all pingbacks to moderation while letting all legit comments through is causing plenty of headaches for me right now.
As for me, I don’t need any more hassles, so count me out of Dec. 15th.
I had been using Spam Karma for the past few years and moved to Akismet at the beginning of November. It’s averaging 250 caught spam comments per day. I think I’m going to have to pass on shutting down Akismet. Things are just a little too nice not having to deal with the spam manually. Can’t wait to read other people’s results, though! Good luck!
Worst idea…ever. The person who made the insulin and diabetes anaolgy was dead on. This is just a terrible idea on so many levels.
I couldn’t do it. I’d go nuts and be all AHHHHH!
Yeah I’m gonna have to agree that the idea is pretty stupid. Yes, just look at your stats. There is no way I’d ever turn of Akismet and have hundreds of spam not only get through in one day but be emailed to those who’ve chosen to subscribe to my comments!!
(I actually use Akismet in conjunction with OSA so that even if the comments are valid they are automatically moderated after my chosen amount of days.)
i think i’ll pass on this.
i usually get about 1000 comments caught by akismet each day.
it would be plain suicide to turn off all moderation.
I could get away with turning off Akismet, but my blog is too small and obscure at the moment to get spam. Not that I’m complaining! I know it’s only a matter of time before I get hit too.
That said, if I had a larger blog I would not turn it off for a day. I have a personal blog, and I can easily see how much Akismet and Spam Karma 2 help me every day. I don’t need to actually see all those spam comments appear in my blog to know how great it is that they are blocked.
I like the insulin/diabetes analogy
If i can remember to turn it off that day then i might
I agree with Carson Sasser. All you have to do to appreciate the good job Askimet is doing is look in your spam box. It’s all there, tucked away and out of sight. The very few that slip through, you just mark as spam. I think Askimet’s great. Let them do their job quietly. Setting a date for everyone to turn off spam filters is just asking the spammers to crank them out triple-time around that time. I don’t see the point in it.
I know what will happen to my blog if I turn akismet off. I was stuck with an older version of wordpress (no-akismet) for quite some time due to theme issues and it wasn’t pretty.
It took me months to dig through everything and remove the spam, now that I have akismet there’s no way I’m turning it off again.
CSS naked I can do, Akismet naked.. no way!
Good luck to all of those who do participate. Don’t forget your hard-hats, you’re gonna need em!
All this is, is a great opportunity and an ANNOUNCEMENT of that opportunity for spammers worldwide. My answer is f*ck no, and no one should do this. Read why here.
To the people saying that this is a bad or stupid idea because of how awful it would be…yeah, that’s kind of the point.
No way. It is too much trouble and no point.
My counter shows a little over 350K spams blocked by Akismet. But that number is deceiving — it’s actually much higher than that. Or it would be, if I didn’t auto-block spamming IPs at my firewall automatically after the first few attempts.
Once I detect multiple spam attempts from a particular IP, they get blocked at a low level. My server would catch fire if I disabled Akismet, or even just my SpamValve auto-blocking.
Why?
No
I adjusted my .htacess file and added the greasemonkey Auntie Spam to my Flock Browser thanks to the great advice here and the links out. I never thought so much about content theft until I noticed one the linkbacks in the Askimet Spam, did a google and what do you know I have been SCRAPED!!
Keep up the great work Lorelle. Cheers Tim.
Let me think about it this first. What gain do I get for doing this? I’m not sure.
But, if I had to do it, I would backup before December 15 and restore the same the following day, as if December 15 never really happened. I don’t want to spend the entire day deleting spam comments.
Yes, December 15 will be “The Day My Blog Stood Still.”
Askimet is a great tool, but you have to combine it with some other common sense steps. Blacklisting certain domain endings (such as .info, .cn, .it, .ru, and .pl, all with / after them) can significantly cut down the amount of spam that even askimet has to look at. The chance that you lose a small sliver of ham is the price to pay to have less work to do on each day your blog is up.
Opening up a blog even for one day is a disaster in the making. If google comes and indexes your pages with links to bad neighborhoods, you could spends months trying to recover.
Why would anyone turn off their spam protection just for the heck of it? That doesn’t even make sense. How much free time does a person have that they can waste it wading through that mess. I’m barely a blip on the radar screen and I get hundreds of spam comments a day. I can’t imagine what it must be like for some others. No way!
Let’s see. I moved to WordPress in November 2006 and in the next year I had 39,000 spam comments blocked. In the last two weeks I’ve had 4,000 more already. That’s 250 a day. My problem is every once in awhile a real comment gets spammed, so I check each one.
I do notice a sharp uptick in spam after I’ve made a bunch of comments on other blogs. Like you said Lorelle I wouldn’t turn off Akismet even if I could.
I must say this though. Some of the spam comments are works of art. To spend so much time crafting a comment with hundreds of links only to be caught. My, my. What’s a poor computer program got to do to get some respect? 😀
Are you kidding… I would go crazy if I turned it off.. I am not that brave!
No way!
At this moment: 209k spam caught by akismet since Aug’06.
Isn’t this a little dangerous? Numerous and comments lead to phishing sites; surely we don’t want to send them more traffic…?
With all due respect, Lorelle, if you’re not willing to turn Akismet off for a day, why should we? Is our time less valuable than yours?
I hadn’t had a problem with spam comments until about three weeks ago. After coming in steady at a rate of at least 50 spam comments per day, I decided to activate Akismet two weeks ago. Since then, it has blocked over 2,000 spam comments.
Now, someone has the “bright” idea of turning it off for a day, just to see how bad spam would get without it? Sorry, but I know how bad it can be without it. I don’t want to go back to that!
15th December is SPAM-Day, guys. Do not turn off Akismet.
My site has been totally garbaged with spam, akismet took care of it all. I joined in to try out and have been completely naked for 24 hrs now. Not one single spam-comment…
I’ve been loosing readers i guess.
Well, let’s admit, he sure has gotten a good bit of press and this action of his definitely boosted the inbound links to his blog 🙂
simpla captcha do the job
asking how much give 3+1 to users cuting 99% of spam …
Worst filtering rules ever!
Or you assume to ignore every chinese, italian, russian, polish blogers
Damn this is so stupid
Like you, I can’t turn it off, but even if I could I wouldn’t. The weird thing is for the past three days I changed my setting to moderate all comments and am actually having more spam slip through Akismet than before when I didn’t.
What scares me is the amount of bandwidth that chart may represent. Yikes! And that doesn’t include bandwidth for spam email.
I think this is one I’ll pass on. I know how much Akismet helps, I go through and clean it hourly (when I’m awake). To turn it off would be like committing harikari on my blog….
@tenshu:
Indeed, blacklisting domain extensions like this hurt many good sites, and CAPTCHAs don’t work. Both are bad techniques. The math test quiz was broken a couple years ago by spammers.
Akismet, working with community support to designate spam when we find it, really does a fantastic job, minimizing the work of handling comment spam.
Wow, the PR genius was behind this idea needs to be flogged. I don’t need to be reminded how good Akismet works. Understandably, the intention was probably to raise awareness about Akismet, but it comes off as condescending and self-aggrandizing. I love the plugin, so why would I turn it off? It’s like asking everyone to leave the front door open all day while nobody’s home.
@Jennifer:
The spam slipping through has nothing to do with moderation, though moderation can lose you readers, as has been proven repeatedly. It doesn’t impact comment spam at all.
Everyone’s been getting more slip through comment spams lately as comment spammers are changing tactics…again and again and again and again…it comes and goes in waves.
I don’t think I will do it.. Too many SPAM for me 😦
I don’t do the askimet thing, but I love Spam Karma 2 and would be loathe to turn it off.
but I routinely blog naked. just sayin.
I won’t be turning off Akismet, but I would feel that I was missing out if I stopped getting spam. The best bits are worth saving… I stash mine here.
Ah well, there goes a whole day, or is it week?
Turn off Akismet? Nope not gonna do it. However… would I be willing to write a “loving and glowing” akismet post on said date giving the statistics of my akismet blocking? You bet. In fact I would think we could all do that as a way to say “thank you” to the folks who wrote the best plugin ever!
@beardedgit #47: I have not seen someone keep the juicy spam bits before… what a fantastic idea.
I noted (rather tongue-in-cheek) back on my blog that a successful blog was when SPAM > Unique visits (http://thomo.coldie.net/technology/your-blog-is-successful-when-spam-unique-visits/)
A short time after that post, I am now at SPAM being two times the number of unique visitors. The SPAM growth appears to be geometric, the unique visitors a slow arithmetic growth.
I already appreciate Akismet and my SPAM levels are only in 5 digits at that moment.
Considering how much spam it catches for me every day, it would be more trouble than it’s worth to turn it off. But, believe me, I appreciate. Just like I know how much pants are worth to me, but I don’t need to go a day without them.
Actually, though….going a day without pants would be fun, right?
After having read about spam on several blogs over the last few days, I start to believe that my blog is really hard to find. In the past few weeks I received 66 spam comments, and since the day before yesterday no spammer seemed to have found my blog (happy me).
I can’t imagine that the http:BL WordPress Plugin I use makes such a difference? Maybe I should disable that plugin for a few days to see if that makes a difference.
@Comment #50
LOL
Turning off this for a day sounds kind of scary. One of my blogs that has been going since May 2006 has –
Akismet has protected your site from 35,239 spam comments.
Now that is alot of spam!
Sure i’ll turn off akismet on 15th December oh Yea !
Akismet is a great tool for cutting down spam, but the bandwidth used by the bots is just too much over running my
server day and night, apart from blocking ip address i may soon
run out of bandwidth and be forced to cut the servers load on users, i know my blogs way too obscure and not updated much, so
why so many bots each day. ?
You courageous souls, I look forward to hearing about your experience. I, for one, am not willing to go naked. I really don’t like the clean-up and don’t have time for that.. Ever!
I’m very grateful to have Akismet installed and it has done a fantastic job. I’m still the problem trying to figure out what others are real and splogs.
I would be willing to be naked while blogging for one day. Does that count?
Akismet, fine, but you can be sure I won’t turn off Bad Behavior for even a moment.
I did turned-off akismet but I have CAPTCHA installed. oh well, there’s not much traffic on my site anyways so it’s really a problem for me.
Why use AKISMET only? It is not very wise…
Reasons?
1) AKISMETS blocks SPAM, but you have to review it manually. This means, you have to spend some of your precious time, reviewing sh*t comments from spammers, just to check, if there are some real ones, and…
2) Some real ones, there are, sometimes, and they are caught by accident by AKISMET. So you need to seek for them and un-spam them…
What you should really do is:
Install first level basic spam protection for:
1) spam comments, and
2) spam trackback/pingback
…then:
3) turn on AKISMET for whatever is not caught by the first level of protection.
1 & 2 will catch 95-98% of spam, the rest can be checked manually in AKISMET cue…
Cheers, M.
I am willing to go naked for one day, providing I can stay in bed 🙂
Spam Filter Free Day UPDATE. We are now 8 hours into the experiment (we’re on central european time, remember).
So far we have got 336 spam comments in the past 8 hours. And 2 legit comments.
(there may be more, but we really encourage people to keep copies of their legit comments and follow up to make sure we don’t accidentaly mark it as spam when we mark comments as spam as we end the experiment in 16 hours)
One thing we learned so far is that strangely enough, our spam comment number dropped from 2000-3000 each day down to 100. We don’t know why, but there may actually be spammers that understand they have absolutely no value by writing comments (nofollow on links, etc).
One other thing we learned. This topic has split blogger in two: The majority which think this is an insane experiment, and a minority that want to follow us in this. And furthermore, as the day has now started, I can see that a some of the blogs that wanted to follow, have actually not done it.
Thanks to everybody who left comments both here and on our blog. I really appreciate the comments and respect both points of views.
Find an update on justaddwater.dk within the next 24 hours.
PS. There are some guessing in comments about traffic numbers and inability to serve regular users. I can see from our MeasureMap that we had 118 visitors the first 8-9 hours. Thats exactly one third of total traffic on normal weekends. So it seems that availability of the webserver is not an issue at all. (but we never know if things changes the next 15-16 hours…)
AS promised, here is the update with a few findings from our Spam Filter Free day:
Justaddwater.dk: Cleanup Time — Spam Filter Free Day
Since installing the Spambam plugin I have had no comment spam at all.
http://www.thespanner.co.uk/category/spam-bam/
13 Trackbacks/Pingbacks
[…] Lorelle is saying that Askimet is asking (no pun intended) their millions of users to turn their spam prevention script off for an entire day thus, making their site “naked” and allowing spam bots to post spam comments, a major problem on the blogosphere. Askimet has actually chosen a date for everyone to simultaneously turn off their spam protection, Dec. 15th, 2007 and I can’t help but think to myself that this is the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard of. […]
[…] not to go through with the project. Like so many others that commented on Lorelle’s article, (Are You Willing To Go Naked For One Day For Akismet) I can see just how much work Akismet has saved me from doing by looking at the spam filter […]
[…] asks “Are you willing to go naked for one day for Akismet“, in which she wonders if bloggers would be willing to turn off Akismet for a day. Seems not […]
[…] Akismet’s the only WordPress plugin I use (because I really don’t know about any others, although checking out my current Plugins change, there’s apparently something called a “Hello Dolly” plugin, which sounds rather creepy), so this post caught my attention: Are you willing to go naked for one day for Akismet? […]
Turn Off Akismet?
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[…] 而我现在说的此裸跑非彼裸跑。一个很无聊的家伙，决定于12月15日，把自己blog的所有防spam插件停用。他的目的是想看看防spam插件如Akismet，一天能为自己省下多少麻烦。他也坦言这是一个自杀式任务，所以我不认为有很多人会参与他的行动。Lorelle尽管帮他宣传了一下，却也表明自己决不会干这种傻事。 […]
[…] bei euch? Ähnliche Erfahrungen gemacht?Da frag ich mich allen Ernstens ob ich nicht auch bei der “go naked” Aktion von Lorelle […]
[…] Som tur är finns det sätt att skydda sig och ett av de bättre är Aksimet som analyserar kommentarer och låter bloggare runt om i världen hjälpa till att ständigt förbättra filtren. Det funkar faktiskt så pass bra att få bloggare ens tänker på att de har skyddet, så nu har det kommit en utmaning för att påminna oss om hur bra vi har det. Kör en dag utan Aksimet, eller som bloggen Lorelle on WordPress skriver: Are You Willing To Go Naked For One Day For Akismet? […]
[…] When Jesper Rønn-Jensen announced he was turning off Akismet for the day, many thought it was an outrageous thing to do, but now the results are in and Jepser shares the lessons learned about being Akismet free and then […]
[…] Lorelle is saying that Askimet is asking (no pun intended) their millions of users to turn their spam prevention script off for an entire day thus, making their site “naked” and allowing spam bots to post spam comments, a major problem on the blogosphere. Askimet has actually chosen a date for everyone to simultaneously turn off their spam protection, Dec. 15th, 2007 and I can’t help but think to myself that this is the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard of. […]
[…] Are You Willing To Go Naked For One Day For Akismet? […]
[…] Are You Willing To Go Naked For One Day For Akismet? covers the interesting proposal Akismet asked: “Would you be willing to turn off Akismet’s comment spam protection for a day?” The responses have been very interesting. […]
[…] Are You Willing To Go Naked For One Day For Akismet? covers the interesting proposal Akismet asked: “Would you be willing to turn off Akismet’s comment spam protection for a day?” The responses have been very interesting. […]