Spam Comments Dropped 95% Overnight
It’s no secret that we will keep this blog spam filter free on December 15th. For some strange reason we only had 127 spam comments in the last 27 hours. This is a drop to just above 100 a day (as opposed to the previous level 2,000-3,000 per day), which translates to a 95% drop overnight.
Thomas and I just had a conversation about what is going on. Could it be that spammers now give up after reading that comments here really give them no value (or pagerank)? Not only are links removed with Akismet, .htaccess files, blacklists and more. We also instantly remove the very few that slip through.
Or did Akismet modify it’s algorithms? Or did the worlds worst spammers just get blocked centrally somewhere? Or is this just silence before December 15th?
What do you think?
Is anybody else experiencing heavy drops in spam traffic?
Related info:
Technorati Tags: akismet, spam, comments, justaddwater, blogging, spam-filter-free, spam filter, wordpress
December 4th, 2007 at 13:33 (GMT-1)
After Thomas added the Akismet counter to the frontpage anyone can follow our spam count publically. Currently 513,000 (which is roughly 12,000 in the last 7 days including the last day with only 127 spam comments)
December 5th, 2007 at 22:17 (GMT-1)
Still, the number keeps low: Now 229 spam comments in the last 60 hours — only 3 spam comments per hour on average — or 72 per day.
And only 229-127 = 102 spam comments since I published this post yesterday, 30.6 hours ago.
I really wonder what’s going on?
December 12th, 2007 at 09:47 (GMT-1)
We have recieved a total of 1317 spam comments the last nine days … roughly 146 each day on average. So the spam count is a little up … but not that much.
115 the last 24 hours.
December 12th, 2007 at 13:51 (GMT-1)
[…] Spam Comments Dropped 95% Overnight […]
December 14th, 2007 at 17:07 (GMT-1)
Now it’s up to 1670 since this post. Since last time 1670-1317= 353 spam comments in the last 38 hours which translates to
222 the last 24 hours
December 16th, 2007 at 02:26 (GMT-1)
Spam Filter Free Day, 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 18th, 2007 at 10:56 (GMT-1)
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