Thank You Akismet
Without Akismet (or similar software for other blogging platforms), I think blogging might be starting to die a slow death or at least change completely in the way it’s done (less freedom and openness).
Why? Because comment spam, which has already been quite bad, seems to have taken a huge turn for the worse over the last few weeks. Example: between 5:00pm yesterday evening and 9:00am this morning 74 spam comments were left on my blog. Mind you, all of them were caught.
74 spam and that’s just for my low-traffic, mostly unknown and therefore not really targeted blog. One can only imagine what the big sites are facing. I guess Matt Muellenweg’s spam counter (784,370 total spam rejected at the time of writing this post) gives a small indication. As a comparison, my spam rejected counter is currently at 1,862 (that’s since September 2006).
Without spam detection software that either quarantines or right out deletes “suspicious” comments, the only other choice would be to either severely limit who can leave a comment (require registration) and how to leave a comment (ask to type in a captcha), or to turn off commenting, which is an integral part of blogging, entirely.
There would simply be no other way to handle it. Sites would just be overwhelmed and turned into unwilling advertisers for all kinds of junk. Usenet pretty much went down that route. That’s were spam originated. People got fed up and stopped using it — at least for the purpose it was originally created to serve.
Let’s hope spammers won’t be able to do the same to the blogging community. For Internet-wide Akismet statistics, see their statistics page. It’s scary stuff.
