Thank you Akismet!

by on April 22, 2007

I just took a short nap. About an hour and a half.

While I was sleeping on the couch Akismet blocked 453 spams from getting into my comments here.

I’m getting more than 10,000 comment spams on some days. It’s really amazing how good a job Akismet does.

How does it work? Well, it learns from everyone’s spam marking behavior. It presents me with some spam (I block all first-timers from going directly into comments and need to approve everything). When I mark stuff as spam it’ll probably mark it as spam on your blog, saving you a lot of work.

So, Akismet, and other spam blockers, are spreading the workload out to everyone.

If it weren’t for Akismet I would have turned off my comments long ago.

Thank you Akismet! And to Automattic, the parent company (they also build Wordpress.com, which is the blog service I use to blog here), started by Matt Mullenweg. Really brilliant service.

UPDATE: funny, while writing this post it blocked another 25.

  • 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.
  • rohitj
    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:-

    (no idea how this code will be displayed here)

    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.
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