Thank you Akismet!

I’m not sure why, but spam is incredibly spiky, check out some of the peaks on this graph:

http://akismet.com/stats/

I suspect it’s from when they’re able to bring new botnets online.

Akismet isn’t perfect, but it’s made infinitely better by all the people using it and helping it learn from its mistakes, so thank you for using it.

Have you noticed any Twitter spam yet?

There is something up lately, I had a barrage of spams yesterday. I use Bad Behavior also. The combination of Bad Behavior and Akismet seems to put less of a strain on my servers.

Yes, Douglas is right, the combo of Akismet and Bad Bahavior really keep out the non-human generated spam.

Just curious but do you use the commercial version or are you on the personal?

I have 2 year old blogs that see absolutely no escalation in spam over the last 18 months, and the exact same spam attacks my current blog.

In fact it has got to the stage due to the snowballing in spam karma that I rarely get a notification email from Spam Karma to indicate a possible false positive.

I am pretty sure the bigger spam outfits can detect which plugins are being used and specifically target those running Akismet.

“I am pretty sure the bigger spam outfits can detect which plugins are being used and specifically target those running Akismet.”

How would they do that? If they could detect Akismet, which I don’t know how they’d do reliably, in theory they should avoid those blogs to keep Akismet from learning their techniques.

Wouldn’t it be cool if Google paid for a back channel of askimet info for marking spam on the internet as fast as possible.

It would be nice if my listing something as spam would echo across the internet. Will we ever get to a world where spam no longer makes people money?

Check out Comment Timeout. It turns off comments for old posts at a user-defined date. I choose 30 days in the past and went from 1,000 spams a day on my main blog to about 30.

It works with Akismet and Bad Behavior, checking their logs, and using that information to further block spam.

http://www.jamesmckay.net/code/comment-timeout/

I still find it surprising that MySpace is doing nothing about Spam control. You would think in a manageable environment, they would have this covered by now.

It is a simple process of elimination

With Spam Karma there are things that can be detected such as:-

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document.write(”);

(end of code)

Here are my 6 months stats

* Total Spam Caught: 19214 (average karma: -11794.48)
* Total Comments Approved: 1447 (average karma: 11.48)
* Total Comments Moderated: 567
* Current Version: 2.3 rc1

I have seen an increase this month, up to currently 300 spam per day, but that is a fraction of what other bloggers receive.

Almost all of that spam is using BBCode for the links.

There is another factor – eyeballs

If you are using Akismet, every once in a while you will go checking for false positives.

With Spam Karma I get emails for potential false positives and thus the amount of eyeballs on spam are greatly reduced.

I’m having serious problems with Aksiment. It says that it caught 5 comments, but it’s only displaying two. I want to just go and delete those other three but I can’t view them. I’m going to have to disable Akismet, pathetically bad