Announcement: Spam Filter Free Day
Get ready for a suicide mission: On this blog, we will remove our spam filter completely for one day, December 15th.
Today we got our spam comment number 500,000. Pretty scary to think how much energy, computer power, network traffic is wasted on a completely useless activity: To spoil the content with irrelevant comments.
Currently we get somewhere between 2000 and 3000 spam comments each day.
The thing is, that Thomas and I are discussing: We don’t know exactly how much work our spam filter does for us… Granted, 500,000 spam comments is a pretty high number. But we want to know how much pain this saves us for. How much blood and sweat do we.
I have one suggestion: How about declaring spam-filter free day one day a year. What about December 15th, which is available according to wikipedia?
The purpose of Spam Filter Free day is to
- put focus on how much energy, computer power, network traffic, and manual work is wasted by the completely irrelevant comments
- put focus on spam filters and their current effectiveness
- We remove the filter a saturday, where traffic is usually lower (so the annoyance for the end-users will be as little as possible)
For this to work we have to:
- Disable our secret server-validation (that we use before the comment hits wordpress)
- Disable the plugin that emails subscribers when a new comment arrives
- Disable Akismet
- Disable our blacklist that holds comments for moderation if certain words are in the comment
- Disable the function that holds a comment for moderation if it has a certain number of links
- Disable any plugin that makes spammers gain from the fact that we disable our spam filters. (For instance the “no nofollow” or “dofollow” plugin)
Join us if you like, and drop a comment about it here :) And if you do drop a comment here on December 15th, please forgive us if we accidentally mark a correct comment as spam. We will probably have a hard time cleaning up afterwards. If your comment dissappears, contact us as soon as possible.
Related articles:
- 100,000 Blog Spam Comments (Feb 26th)
- Blog Usability: Spam Comments Irritate Subscribers (April 2nd)
- Spam Commenters Are Wasting Brainpower (September 9th)
Technorati Tags: akismet, spam, comments, justaddwater, blogging, spam-filter-free, spam filter, wordpress
November 27th, 2007 at 11:49 (GMT-1)
Interesting experiment – i’m looking forward to a complete time wasted calculation in minutes and an “Akismet saves me x.xxx DKK a day” post :-)
I’m sorry for not joining you in the experiment although my spam amount is much lower.
I hope you’ll publish all the different numbers involved – time spent deleting, visits in period, spam post etc. – for further interesting calculations.
Andreas
November 27th, 2007 at 12:21 (GMT-1)
We are catching you :)
“Akismet has caught 47,529 spam for you since you first installed it.”
November 27th, 2007 at 12:33 (GMT-1)
Akismet has caught 23,057 spam for you since you first installed it.
Pathetic :-)
November 27th, 2007 at 12:49 (GMT-1)
You’re crazy, just plain crazy!
I wouldn’t do this and I get merely 100s of spam a day, not thousands, and I’m only going to hit 20,000 spam by the end of this week!
I do look forward to your analysis of what happened though. Hope you don’t have to spend too long clearing up!
November 27th, 2007 at 21:32 (GMT-1)
Hehe, good luck with that. You’re going to prove that spam sucks.
November 28th, 2007 at 19:26 (GMT-1)
[...] November 28th, 2007 Jesper Rønn-Jensen is planning to remove all spam protection from his blog on December 15. It’s easy to forget just how much anti-spam solutions help bloggers. It’s not just [...]
November 28th, 2007 at 19:56 (GMT-1)
[...] This sounds interesting. Currently, I use Akismet + comment approval + .htaccess blocking. I will try to turn off Akismet and remove blocking in .htaccess, but I won’t let comment shows up without my approval. I can also test how good Akismet can re-check comments if they are spams or not. Category: Announcement, Blogging World, Net Kingdom | Tags: Akismet, spam [...]
November 28th, 2007 at 20:01 (GMT-1)
Really wish you good luck. 3000 spam is a lot and since you declare it ahead, you may expect more.
How about a bigger challenge? Keep everything else active and shut down only the spam protection. I will subscribe to your comments.
My idea? To not only see how much YOU pain but I, as a reader pain. How about that?
November 28th, 2007 at 20:13 (GMT-1)
Binh, thanks a lot.
We hope that you as a reader suffer as little as possible. That’s why we will disable email notifications for readers that decide to subscribe via email.
But probably the comment RSS Feed will be the “worst” thing to subscribe to.
Frankly the thought above to keep comments for moderation is even better. But now when Thomas and I have declared to keep our guards down, we will stick to it :)
November 28th, 2007 at 20:55 (GMT-1)
Spam sucks – don’t know what I’d do without akismet.
November 28th, 2007 at 21:56 (GMT-1)
Jesper,
You are nuts. I might join you, but let me think about it. I don’t want to spend the whole day deleting spam. Maybe, a quick database backup and restore as if December 15 never happened. That might do the trick.
Ulysses
November 29th, 2007 at 01:17 (GMT-1)
Interesting experiment, but I must say that I am chocked by the 2000-3000 comments spam figure. I get about 1-4 spam comments per month, none of which is automatic (all from people who manually write a comment to get their website known).
I also get about about 10 attempted spams per day – most of which is spammer trying to post content to known wordpress files, but since I am not using wordpress, all of these attempts ends up on my 404 page.
…and about 4 hacking attempts, where a person have tried accessing varies DLL files, admin interface or cgi entry points (none of which I use either, so I am no risk there either).
What you get is a spam comment every 30 seconds! You are literally under attack…
I don’t understand why you don’t try to mask your comment form, or prevent the spammers from running their scripts.
November 29th, 2007 at 01:21 (GMT-1)
BTW: Just out of curiosity – how much time do you spend on handling spam emails now? That is, the time it takes to look through the spam being filtered + the time spend deleting spam that missed the filter, Whitelisting and blacklisting people etc.?
November 29th, 2007 at 02:08 (GMT-1)
I’m curious: on December 16th, after you reactivate all of your systems, are you going to submit to Akismet the spam that accumulated on the 15th? And are you using a “professional” Akismet account, or a free one?
I might take part just to see what happens.
November 29th, 2007 at 04:54 (GMT-1)
Hmmm… Interesting experiment.
Pardon me if I misinterpreted your post, but it read as though you were going to allow automatic approval of comments. If this is the case, do you intend to put into effect some sort of indexing block in place so that search engines don’t pick up the comments and display them in your SERPs? If I misinterpreted and you are going to manually approve comments, then please disregard that question.
I’m curious also as to how much time you are investing in comment moderation with your current measures in place. Currently, I’m only using Simple Trackback Validation and JS SpamBlock and I manually approve all first posts by a any author. All subsequent posts that don’t have more than X links in the body are automatically approved. I’m spending less than an hour a week moderating comments. I too have a “do follow” blog and advertise that fact.
My experience, thus far, is that I spend even less time moderating comments than I did when I ran Bad Behavior + Akismet. I’m not saying that Bad Behavior and Akismet are ineffective. Obviously they are effective. Most of the spam I get is of the automated variety, therefore, JS SpamBlock has been highly effective for me.
Have you tried other measures than what you have listed in this post?
November 29th, 2007 at 06:16 (GMT-1)
My blog is still pretty young so I haven’t yet received any more than 20 spam comments a day, but I’ll take part! :)
November 29th, 2007 at 07:27 (GMT-1)
[...] also adds that Jesper Rønn-Jensen is turning off all comment spam protection on December 15 to experience what it is really like to go without Akismet for just 24 hours. Mark invites you to [...]
November 29th, 2007 at 08:48 (GMT-1)
By this experiment you may conduct another thing in summary for fail possitive spam cupture.
November 29th, 2007 at 10:33 (GMT-1)
[...] that our spam experiment scheduled for December 15th got mentioned by the Akismet Blog, Blogherald, and many other [...]
November 29th, 2007 at 11:52 (GMT-1)
I’ve just added an Akismet counter to our front page (see the right column) that shows how much spam Akismet have caught so far :)
November 29th, 2007 at 12:22 (GMT-1)
[...] 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 [...]
November 29th, 2007 at 13:14 (GMT-1)
It would be interesting if spammers set up their spambots to do some extra spamming on December 15th.
November 29th, 2007 at 14:18 (GMT-1)
You’re nuts… :|
November 29th, 2007 at 15:14 (GMT-1)
[...] Rønn-Jensen is removing all spam protection from his blog on December 15 to highlight how much energy, computer power, network traffic, and [...]
November 29th, 2007 at 16:58 (GMT-1)
[...] den 15 desember i år. Dette i seg selv er jo ikke noe store saker, men han skriver om det i bloggen sin – og når du annonserer dette i en engelsk språklig blogg som daglig mottar mellom [...]
November 29th, 2007 at 20:31 (GMT-1)
[...] seems a blogger named Jesper Rønn-Jensen is going to turn off all spam protection on his site for the day on December [...]
November 29th, 2007 at 21:18 (GMT-1)
[...] be turning off Akismet. Ok, not really. But Jesper Rønn-Jensen has decided to do it. He calls it, Spam Filter Free day where he will disable the Akismet anti spam tool on his blog for 24 hours to figure out, just how [...]
November 30th, 2007 at 00:32 (GMT-1)
[...] Jesper Rønn-Jensen of justaddwater.dk publicly announced recently that on December 15th he would be turning off all spam filtering devices. The point? To really get a chance to see just how much time and effort our spam-catching programs save us. You really can’t have a true appreciation for something until it’s gone or you see first hand what it really does for you, I’ll readily admit and agree to that, but I’m not sure I’m ready to let the spammers in. [...]
November 30th, 2007 at 04:14 (GMT-1)
[...] wondering how many of you are willing to make the move that Jesper Rønn-Jensen will be making on December 15. I have thought about doing so for the day, [...]
November 30th, 2007 at 08:19 (GMT-1)
[...] stumbled upon through the Akismet blog, Jesper Rønn-Jensen is planning to completely disable his spam filters on December 15. While that may sound a bit crazy, it’s an interesting experiment to see just [...]
November 30th, 2007 at 09:00 (GMT-1)
“This blog is protected by Dave’s Spam Karma 2: 75273 Spams eaten and counting…”
and
“Akismet has caught 95,405 spam for you since you first installed it.”
(presumably my spam total is not an addition of the two…)
I’m not sorry I ‘m not joining you, come December 15th ;-)
November 30th, 2007 at 10:52 (GMT-1)
Nice idea. It will lead more people to appreciate how much spam we get in a day and how much time it will take to simply moderate spam without all these anti-spam plugins.
November 30th, 2007 at 10:56 (GMT-1)
BTW: Looking at my spam stats makes me scared at how much cleaning I will have to do afterwards. Here it goes so far:
“845848 spam comments were blocked by Angsuman’s Comment Guard plugin in 316 days 16 hours 1 minutes. 99.456% of the comments received during this time were spam.”
November 30th, 2007 at 13:37 (GMT-1)
[...] of people are talking about turning off Akismet for a day to see how much work it actually does. I think that’s [...]
November 30th, 2007 at 15:36 (GMT-1)
[...] have seen referenced on a couple of other blogs. Jesper Rønn-Jensen on justaddwater.dk is going to turn off all comment spam protection on his blog on December 15 to highlight how much anti spam solutions help bloggers and to higlight [...]
November 30th, 2007 at 20:09 (GMT-1)
[...] am wondering if a proposed idea is any good or not, as an announcement on JustAddWater.dk has been growing in power on the web. The idea: turn off Akismet for a day. The idea is to be [...]
November 30th, 2007 at 21:51 (GMT-1)
Here’s a suggestion – is people backup their database on the 14th, then don’t post on the 15th, they can restore the spam – free version from before the 15th ;)
December 1st, 2007 at 08:26 (GMT-1)
[...] 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。 [...]
December 1st, 2007 at 13:52 (GMT-1)
Egy nap Spam-védelem nélkül…
I’ll join to this initiative. On December 15th. Spammers, take your weapons and let’s fight! :o)
—
Úgy döntöttem, hogy csatlakozom a kezdeményezéshez. Ez a blog egy napon keresztül Spam-védelem nélkül fog üzemelni, decembe…
December 1st, 2007 at 21:35 (GMT-1)
[...] Some dude is going to deactivate his spam protection (Akismet) for one day, on December 15th, and the idea is actually starting to spread. [...]
December 2nd, 2007 at 11:56 (GMT-1)
[...] Maar goed, wat doe je dan als beetje weblogger zijnde? I have one suggestion: How about declaring spam-filter free day one day a year. What about December 15th, which is available according to wikipedia?– Announcement: Spam Filter Free Day [...]
December 2nd, 2007 at 12:17 (GMT-1)
This whole thing is a bad idea, and encouraging others to join is irresponsible. According to http://www.myipneighbors.com/ there are at least 25 other sites on your server, that will potentially suffer from your experiment. Once botnets discover that they can get comments through on your site, they will hammer your server, possibly even for a while after you re-instate your defenses, and the other sites on your server could could suffer extremely slow access times or be unreachable.
December 2nd, 2007 at 17:41 (GMT-1)
Hi Dean
I don’t think that the spammers actually check to see if their spam comments gets through – that would mean extra work and usage of their own bandwidth. If they in deed did this why are they then still spamming? And again, if they on the 15th suddenly see that their spam gets through, it would be very easy for them to also see that there is a rel=”nofollow” attached to all their links.
Personally I don’t think that we will see an increase in spamming activity. If spammers read this, they will also read that we will apply the rel=”nofollow” at the same time. Which by the way, I suggest everybody should do if they plan to follow suit (WordPress uses rel=”nofollow” by default unless you have a plugin that disables it).
December 2nd, 2007 at 22:24 (GMT-1)
Thomas,
It’s completely automated…we’re not talking about manual spammers here anyway…we’re talking about botnets. Trust me, they do check, and I can show you stat upon stat that demonstrates how when they find one successful avenue of getting links through, they pursue it and get links to various sites. Obviously their first choice is a link without nofollow, but they’ll take anything they can get because it still gets their product in front of people who click the links. By opening up spam on your site, you can potentially bring neighboring sites on the same server to a grinding halt, in extreme cases. It would be one thing if you had a dedicated server, but with a shared host you have the potential to damage other businesses whose sites are on your server. That’s a very irresponsible thing to encourage others to do. This experiment is a very bad idea.
December 3rd, 2007 at 08:53 (GMT-1)
[...] Announcement: Spam Filter Free Day wat een volslagen belachelijk idee! aan de andere kant: dit log draait al maanden zonder spamfilter, nu jij weer Jesper [...]
December 3rd, 2007 at 16:11 (GMT-1)
[...] Akismet has a post about a blog that will be going protection-free for 24 hours on December 15th, just as a reminder of how important spam protection is. And they want you to join them. [...]
December 4th, 2007 at 13:26 (GMT-1)
[...] no secret that we will kepp this blog spam filter free on December 15th. For some strange reason we only had 127 spam comments in the last 27 hours. This [...]
December 4th, 2007 at 19:22 (GMT-1)
[...] um maluco na internet com uma idéia suicida (blogueiramente [...]
December 4th, 2007 at 21:35 (GMT-1)
[...] 15th has been declared “Spam Filter Free Day“. (i will participate, if i can [...]
December 5th, 2007 at 12:20 (GMT-1)
[...] as curious as the next about what the tabulated results will be for Spam Filter Free Day but I’d really rather see the evidence gathered in a less painful way. Mainly because it [...]
December 6th, 2007 at 07:18 (GMT-1)
[...] Rønn-Jensen ja Thomas Watson on oma blogis justaddwater.dk välja tulnud huvitava ideega: nad keeravad üheks päevaks, 15. detsembril, oma blogi [...]
December 6th, 2007 at 10:25 (GMT-1)
Aarne blog above pointed me to Comment timeout plugin, where you can choose to close comments on old posts — or even better — hold comments on old posts for moderation.
That’s a super tip! and I’m sure we will seriously consider that for our setup here at http://www.justaddwater.dk
December 6th, 2007 at 16:06 (GMT-1)
just saw my akisment score passed 127.000 spam comments. what the hell :)
December 14th, 2007 at 21:45 (GMT-1)
[...] 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 [...]
December 15th, 2007 at 00:29 (GMT-1)
[...] When we announced the Spam Filter Free Day 18 days ago, we didn’t think that it would draw so much attention. But the amount of comments and buzz around the blogosphere have been really overwhelming. Most notably is that we caught the attention of the comment-spam fighting company of all times: Akismet. [...]
December 16th, 2007 at 02:26 (GMT-1)
Short update: I spent a total of 2 hours deleting 1111 spam comments, re-activating Akismet etc., and re-finding the 6 valid comments and trackbacks recieved during the last 24 hours. More info in separate post later.
December 20th, 2007 at 05:15 (GMT-1)
[...] Day Lessons Learned: 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 [...]
February 4th, 2008 at 09:35 (GMT-1)
[...] catch: Jesper Rønn-Jensen is disabling all spam filters for a day on December 15, to see how much time actually is wasted sorting out spam comments, and how Akismet [...]
March 15th, 2008 at 19:19 (GMT-1)
I take it the spam day has been and gone. how did it go?
March 15th, 2008 at 19:31 (GMT-1)
@close protection: take a look at “Cleanup Time — Spam Filter Free Day” december 18th 2007:
http://justaddwater.dk/2007/12/18/cleanup-time-spam-filter-free-day/
March 17th, 2008 at 00:47 (GMT-1)
[...] see an experiment conducted by JustAddWater where they turned off their spam filter for a day. The results will amaze you! Related PostsWordPress Week: AkismetWordPress 2.3 Disable NoFollowPR Update October [...]
March 23rd, 2008 at 10:28 (GMT-1)
I’ve just added an Akismet counter to our front page (see the right column) that shows how much spam Akismet have caught so far :)
March 30th, 2008 at 10:22 (GMT-1)
Everybody should fight with spam. A useless effort.
April 14th, 2008 at 03:24 (GMT-1)
Currently, I’m only using Simple Trackback Validation at my blog Mega Bonus and I manually approve posts by authors.
June 7th, 2008 at 12:12 (GMT-1)
I’ve just added an Akismet counter to our front page (see the right column) that shows how much spam Akismet have caught so far :)
June 17th, 2008 at 23:38 (GMT-1)
oh, darn… missed the spam filter free day!!!
so what are you’re conclusions?
June 18th, 2008 at 00:00 (GMT-1)
@evelyn,
June 22nd, 2008 at 03:15 (GMT-1)
so how was the spam free day? and will it come back?regards from germany
August 13th, 2008 at 16:34 (GMT-1)
I never thought about the pure about of energy and resources wasted by spammers, comment spam only being one part of the whole spam arena. I cannot imagine the pure volume of spam generated every day.
My main blog doesn’t get much spam and my filters do a really good job of catching it, so I don’t waste much time managing it.
September 3rd, 2008 at 09:15 (GMT-1)
WITH great interest I was reading your post and at every instant I was remembering my experience which where just likely to be same. I must say that I am chocked by the 2000-3000 comments spam figure. I get about 3-5 spam comments per month, none of which is automatic (all from people who manually write a comment to get their website known).
Frankly to say I was unkown about your suggestion but as I read I was feeling somebody else has told me same but who? Than I got that My neibour with whom some time before freely I ask about this matter and he said same. But sorry to myself I ignore him and now I get its brief explanation…. Thx.
September 25th, 2008 at 07:11 (GMT-1)
i’ve made some seo to a place that runs spamming robots, and i was shocked by their sophistication. the robots used to go through the post and compose a relevant comment, and they got response from people…
in addition for spamming in order to promote their websites, i think pr is also a very important parameter, people love the link juice.. but i guess when google 4 example’ll find a better formula, everything’ll be different.
November 7th, 2008 at 13:21 (GMT-1)
Well on the one side I happy that I am not the only one who has to fight with spam (email Spam) and on the other side it scary me how this could happen. Without spam filter it would not be possible to do some work.
March 15th, 2009 at 16:45 (GMT-1)
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