As of last week, Akismet had blocked 100,000 spam comments from this blog. Yes, you read right, a cool hundred thousand. In respect for that milestone, would like to go on record as a paid subscriber of Akismet as of next month. Weblogtoolscollection.com has seen its share of spam and was mentioned in one of the blog updates of Akismet with numbers hovering in the 99.51% comment spam range. Akismet has served me well barring a few offbeat social spam comments and I feel that the developers deserve to be rewarded for their efforts and their service (though I wish I would make anywhere near the money that paid subscribers are supposed to be making from their blogs).
I was in the spam mitigation business with CSPAM and Three Strikes and though the service could only handle a few thousand blogs on my old server, it was quite a trip. It mostly managed itself and I was almost completely spam free during the time I used it. Even though I would like to think that CSPAM was the spark that led to Akismet (Matt and I talked briefly about CSPAM), I am sure the Akismet engine is much more sophisticated and optimized (and not written in PHP like CSPAM). The numbers and processing power needs can be astronomical from my experience. In about nine months CSPAM caught and removed about 700,000 spam comments, had a 10,000 word vocabulary and learned about ten comments a minute. In comparison, Akismet has caught 3,812,040 spam comments and growing and shows absolutely no signs of slowing down. Kudos to the developers.
In short, spam is down, real comments are up and I am a happy camper. I would encourage everyone to try Akismet for their Spam needs. I also urge heavy users to put their money where their Spam was and sign up as a subscribed user.
It may just be related to a decrease in my popularity, but it seems that akismet has actually reduced the amount of spam I actually receive. I haven’t ever cleaned out my database, and the 15-day queue has steadily gone down over the last few months. I’m standing at 590 right now.
It’s likely coincidental and due to other recent changes i made to my site, but i’ve seen a sharp increase in spam since i’ve been using Akismet. I upgraded to WordPress 2.0.1 and enabled Akismet just a few days ago and it’s already halted over 100 spam comments since. It probably took about three months to tally that many before. I also noticed i’m primarily getting a different type of spam than before, but that too is probably not Akismet’s fault. It doesn’t seem to care and catches them all very neatly.
I love Akismet — I’ve been a strong supporter of it for quite some time now. I use it on all my blogs and it works like a charm. Matt has done yet another great thing for the WordPress and blogging community — Congrats Matt!
I am with Miahz on this.
Until a month ago, I got spam like one in 2-3 months (which is due to my blog not being very popular ;))
But after I tried Akismet for a few days, then turned it off, I started getting the “meds” spam more frequently and now, about in a month and a half, I’ve gotten around 100 spam comments.
Yes I am using Akismet.
Another problem I have had with Akismet is that it sometimes shows that I have say 10 spam comments but the interface shows only maybe 5-6 of them. I assume this is because of duplicate comments. But nowhere on the interface does Akismet indicate that and at those times I have to go into the database to ensure it’s not a false positive which Akismet is not showing for some reason 🙁
Akismet is fine except for the ethical issues (namely giving special favours to human-rights-abusing Yahoo)
It’s likely coincidental and due to other recent changes i made to my site, but i’ve seen a sharp increase in spam since i’ve been using Akismet. I upgraded to WordPress 2.0.1 and enabled Akismet just a few days ago and it’s already halted over 100 spam comments since.
Similar things happened with my site when i went to wordpress 2.0, though I never bothered turning akismet on; almost tempted to leave the comments up there (my site is more a cory doctorow like brain dump than a traffic generator, so it doesn’t get much traffic and I normally don’t care about that). HOWEVER, what i have noticed is that ALL the spam comments are made to the one post; my akismet post !!!