Today is Spam Filter Free Day
Saturday the 15th is Spam Filter Free Day here at justaddwater.dk. Why would we ever want to do something like that you ask? Well up until recently we received about 2-3000 spam comments each day so we thought we would draw attention to the wasted bandwidth, time and energy that all these spam comments consume. Not to speak of the large amount of hours with manually filtering all comments that our different spam filtering techniques free us from.
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.
We also recieved our share of warnings from people telling us that this might not be such a good idea after all. I would like to say up front, that we really appreciate this and that we are wiser even now then before the announcement, but we just can’t resist going ahead with the experiment – We might learn even more!
In the next couple of minutes, we’ll remove our barricades, turn the other cheek and just sit, wait, see and learn.
Final remarks:
- If you post any legit comment on our blog within the next 24 hours we’ll try not to delete it when we do our manual spam-cleanup – but let me just apologize up front if we do.
- If you subscribe to our comment-feed, you might notice more comments then usual ;)
Related reading:
- Announcement: Spam Filter Free Day
- Letting Spam In For A Day Questions and Answers
- Spam Comments Dropped 95% Overnight
Technorati Tags: spam filter free day, spam, akismet, blogging, comment spam, spam fighting, bandwidth, justaddwater.dk, event, wordpress, no follow, sketch, monty python
December 15th, 2007 at 01:51 (GMT-1)
Good luck! Hopefully your servers won’t melt.
December 15th, 2007 at 08:19 (GMT-1)
8 hours later I found 186 comments that were still held for moderation. We forgot to modify the rule about holding back comments with more than 3 links.
I have now set it to 99 link before the comments are held back for moderation. Heck, one of the comments had 70 links :)
December 15th, 2007 at 12:19 (GMT-1)
I clean forgot about this until just now. Guess I should leave my anti-spam plugins off for the next 24 hours instead of the rest of the day (it’s 7:17 pm right now)?
Well, let’s sit back and watch how much spam will roll in today :)
December 15th, 2007 at 12:44 (GMT-1)
[...] is het Spam Filter Free Day. Behalve dat dat geweldig mooi klinkt als je dat met luide stem en rollende R uitspreekt — [...]
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 16th, 2007 at 10:05 (GMT-1)
[...] viel me mee. Daarnet Akismet weer aangezet en in een paar klikken de 59 spammetjes eruit gevist. De figuren die met het idee kwamen waren iets meer tijd kwijt: 2 uur voor dik 1100 spams, met nog een paar “echte” [...]
December 18th, 2007 at 05:52 (GMT-1)
[...] recent Spam Filter Free Day and more users wanting to stay up-to-date with the plugin, new features, and spam protection Two [...]
January 8th, 2008 at 09:30 (GMT-1)
[...] While I looking at different options for managing comments, I found out about a blogger who made a point of taking down all the barriers to spam for 24 hours as an experiment. If you are a serious blogger, you might enjoy reading Just Add Water. [...]
March 17th, 2008 at 00:43 (GMT-1)
[...] using Akismet yet? You might be interested to see an experiment conducted by JustAddWater where they turned off their spam filter for a day. The results will amaze you! Related [...]
April 17th, 2008 at 23:54 (GMT-1)
wow, 1111 spam comments is 24 hours, thats an unbelievable waste, of well everything really. amazing.
June 3rd, 2008 at 10:08 (GMT-1)
I’m the online director at Mr & Mrs Smith and we have recently launched our new blog – http://blog.mrandmrssmith.com – we have got an unbelievable amount of automatic spam coming through – I don’t mind that so much although it is a waste of time.
What really annoys me are the other travel companies – competitors – and hotels spamming us just to get their links on our site when we spend so much money and effort being discerning about the places and companies that we recommend.
I think you are very brave letting the spam filters off – I’m not sure I would ever have that courage!
Tamara
June 10th, 2008 at 21:38 (GMT-1)
usually the spammers are the pornography sites. it sucks but its true. i think they are so many of them now on the internet that the competition for their business is so high that they just spam everyday non-stop.
travel companies and viagra is next to the top spammers on my ranks.
who wants a viagra anyway.
but whatever.
July 4th, 2008 at 23:23 (GMT-1)
Spam filter free day – fantastic! I love your angle …. are we having another 24 hour period this year? We receive so much rubbish at our Ibiza Villas site I am up for another “protest” … especially if it actually puts the spammers off. Hurray..
July 17th, 2008 at 21:17 (GMT-1)
Your a brave soul. Wish I had the option of installing Akismet on my blog but it doesn’t run on wordpress as we wrote the script ourselves. Now we have to come up with a solution to the spam by trying to create some kind of filter to slow it down at least or possibly even closing comments for good as a last resort.
July 23rd, 2008 at 16:03 (GMT-1)
Because we are a dating/introductions site we get more spam than most so I think this is very brave and not something I would do for our site. Even though agencies that offer exclusive introductions are in a different market to the online dating sites, we all get put under the same banner.
August 5th, 2008 at 18:38 (GMT-1)
I am fed up of spammy mails I get daily. I get around 300+ mails in spam…But gmail really rocks. They filters very nicely.
August 12th, 2008 at 19:57 (GMT-1)
WP Comments spam rocks:P
August 13th, 2008 at 10:50 (GMT-1)
Very useful, thanks :D
August 13th, 2008 at 21:22 (GMT-1)
Hmm…Interesting idea. Someone should create a plugin for “spam filter free day” notifications. It would catch on to other bloggers really fast.
August 14th, 2008 at 13:52 (GMT-1)
Spam Filter Free Day….? Without Spam filter, I get almost 1000 mails in my mail box.
August 14th, 2008 at 21:33 (GMT-1)
LMAO…spam filter free day, Ive no idea how I came across this blog but I nearly fell off my seat. Spam is the pain of my life at the moment, just changed 2 email addresses because of it that I had used for a long time, royal pain in the a**!!! But I like yer style!
August 16th, 2008 at 04:03 (GMT-1)
very usefull, but WP has alot of spam comments…. all this viagara stuff
August 17th, 2008 at 11:30 (GMT-1)
http://justaddwater.dk/2007/12/15/today-is-spam-filter-free-day/
August 19th, 2008 at 06:08 (GMT-1)
Nice mail. I am fed up of these spammy mails 2
August 23rd, 2008 at 23:45 (GMT-1)
A day without spam it’s Unheard Of ! Only when spammers and antispammers will be in the same boat ! Only then. When hackers will become white collar respectable citizens.
August 25th, 2008 at 09:41 (GMT-1)
It’s very usefull, i think should leave my anti-spam plugins off for the next 24 hours instead of the rest of the day.
August 26th, 2008 at 18:39 (GMT-1)
I think all the blogs shall have a good captha for comments. This could be a great solution!)
August 27th, 2008 at 07:59 (GMT-1)
Your a brave soul. Wish I had the option of installing Akismet on my blog but it doesn’t run on wordpress as we wrote the script ourselves. Now we have to come up with a solution to the spam by trying to create some kind of filter to slow it down at least or possibly even closing comments for good as a last resort.
August 27th, 2008 at 18:03 (GMT-1)
interested, thank you
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August 28th, 2008 at 03:32 (GMT-1)
Interesting experiment… looking through all the spam is to go crazy! I have a site that gets like 50 real visitors a day (from Search Engines) but it gets hit by about 200 spam comments a day! Craaazy
August 28th, 2008 at 12:47 (GMT-1)
‘astronaut food’ said like viagra spam links, it’s absolutely 100% true. For my site, everyday I removed over 10 spam links like viagra. In this regard your info is very useful for my future plan.
August 31st, 2008 at 00:51 (GMT-1)
i hate spam also, so just use captcha and if that doesnt do it start banning ips!
August 31st, 2008 at 08:59 (GMT-1)
If this spam free seriously works then we should ask Blue Mountain to have greetings designed specially for this day.
August 31st, 2008 at 23:25 (GMT-1)
Hey man! That is a ballsy experiment! I’m glad it went well! Askimet kills it allll!
September 1st, 2008 at 03:10 (GMT-1)
greeting cards from blue mountain for spam free day sounds pretty good.
September 1st, 2008 at 18:36 (GMT-1)
hey, love the blog – i will try and keep up with it!! please keep more coming :)I wish I could start a blog but I don’t have much time :(Thanks, nick
September 2nd, 2008 at 13:06 (GMT-1)
y dunt u change ur template using the same old template
September 3rd, 2008 at 21:37 (GMT-1)
Hey man, that is a funny experiment, although I don’t see the point in it! Before I installed askimet I got a load of spam everyday! It was crazy because half the visitors were spammers that left comments!
September 4th, 2008 at 17:23 (GMT-1)
Hello, excellent blog, we have a lot of spam and it grows every day. I like spam best on toast!
September 4th, 2008 at 21:46 (GMT-1)
Hey there! That was a bold experiment! I am glad your server and wordpress didn’t crash :)
September 9th, 2008 at 06:50 (GMT-1)
Every one hates spam.Proper spam filtering techniques must be adopted to filter out these culprits.But unfortunately sometimes even legit commenters are also flagged as spammers.Akismet is an example for this.But i think using Captcha (word verification) would be a good option..
September 13th, 2008 at 23:42 (GMT-1)
This is something you should bring back like once a year. I hate spam it takes me about an hour each day to filter my blogs. I like the idea I might try it on one of my blogs. This is forward thinking.
September 16th, 2008 at 00:28 (GMT-1)
For me it doesn’t take that much time, I just trust askimet, sometimes there are a few false positives but its better than wasting an hour a day!
September 28th, 2008 at 18:20 (GMT-1)
LOL
I cannot believe you get that many spam comments. I also had no idea there are Spam Comments fighting ‘companies.’ Now thats a niche business, hehe.
October 5th, 2008 at 06:47 (GMT-1)
This looks like it was a pretty cool online experiment. I would be interested to hear how it all turned out. I will have to search around on the site and see if I can find a follow up. Cool idea and probably a great way to build traffic to your site if not regular visitors also.
October 6th, 2008 at 22:15 (GMT-1)
Oh.. something interesting is happening going on here.. lols! I like whats happening all here.. :)
October 7th, 2008 at 05:46 (GMT-1)
Pretty nice idea of being an experimental.. dofollow would be beneficial as well, but those only bloggers who does respects and contribute without making any spam around. :) Cheers!
October 10th, 2008 at 05:06 (GMT-1)
That must have been an exhausting experiment. Hope you got a lot of real comments from it as well. Good luck with your future experiments.
October 11th, 2008 at 16:45 (GMT-1)
Great experiment! I have found askimet to be a bit over-cautious, can be a good thing, can be a bad thing. I ended up installing it as I the amount of rubbish built up, didn’t want to because of the problems it can cause for legitimate bloggers. Now I just need to some kind of protection it on my normal comment forms but I’m worried about it catching real enquiries.
October 18th, 2008 at 16:46 (GMT-1)
I think the problem will be that you’re been listed in a do follow blog listing which has then simply left everyone coming out to attack you with rubbish comments.
It happened to our site which is quite small but basically destroyed the workings of our blog as people couldn’t actually follow any of the conversations.
Working in academia its easy to limit it to university only entries but I’m concerned we just shut the genuine people out…
October 20th, 2008 at 16:08 (GMT-1)
spam is my problem too.i should delete 80 mail every day. :(
November 9th, 2008 at 01:20 (GMT-1)
Wow, that’s an interesting experiment… I thought about doing that on my site as well, but then decided to disable comments all together to save my precious time…
November 9th, 2008 at 07:25 (GMT-1)
I commend you for your bravery! At least there are plenty of comments here (and not all spam!)
November 11th, 2008 at 03:18 (GMT-1)
Well that created a buzz didn’t it :D What a response.
November 12th, 2008 at 12:20 (GMT-1)
So how did your spam free day went on. Must have been a day full of comments.
November 16th, 2008 at 09:14 (GMT-1)
ah then i will be spamming your blog then :D ahhahaah joking…
November 18th, 2008 at 05:11 (GMT-1)
There is way too much spam on blogs nowdays. Its very hard to determine which is spam and which is relevant to the post. Most blog spam is merely keywords in a weird non humanism fashion. Some can be harder to spot.
Either way, an interesting test.
December 3rd, 2008 at 16:33 (GMT-1)
I know that filtering 3000 comments a day is really exhausting work but I think using Akismet for judging most all the comment as a spam is really no good. Since, not all comment are spam. maybe you should find some crews to filter comment manually for saving your time.
December 5th, 2008 at 13:30 (GMT-1)
I love the monty python video for spam alot. Goes well with the spam free post.
December 8th, 2008 at 23:50 (GMT-1)
Wow a spam filter free day! This is pretty neat. I only get aroudn 100 spam hits a day, cant imagine 3K. I really fee for ya guys!
March 4th, 2009 at 18:46 (GMT-1)
pretty cool idea. a nice way to manage spam. i get my fair share too, you know.
May 4th, 2009 at 22:05 (GMT-1)
Hi Thomas,
I think I know why you get that many spam comments. Check this out: http://www.smmguru.com/1114-sortable-do-follow-blogs-with-pagerank
Mike
May 14th, 2009 at 08:25 (GMT-1)
HI Thomas, seems I am late and really miss something. But I have admit that the concept of Spam Filter Free Day do amuse me so much. Anyway, as requested, contribute my share to make just another one.
-Tim
June 25th, 2009 at 22:38 (GMT-1)
Hah nothing worse then signing in wordpress only to have 1000 spam comments waiting to be approved.
August 4th, 2009 at 00:32 (GMT-1)
It’s amazing how many spam emails are waiting at the gates for you to open them when you have spam filter free day. 1111 spams to delete in 2 hours is huge! I don’t use a spam filter on any of my sites but maybe I should.