10,000 Spam Comments
Today, my site exceeded the threshold of 10,000 spam comments — according to my Akismet statistics. It only took about a year for my blog to reach that crazy number. Can’t remember exactly when I installed and activated the Akismet plugin for Wordpress (at that time it didn’t come bundled with Wordpress yet).
I briefly had other spam protection solutions (can’t even remember at this point what they were), but switched to Akismet when it became available. I am sure glad I did. I also turned on “automatically delete spam comments from old posts” when that feature became available, and I am very glad about that feature, too.
Without Akismet, I would have been forced to either make it much harder for people to leave legitimate comments (captchas, enforcing logging in, etc.) or turn off commenting altogether. I can’t believe that blog spamming is that bad these days that my tiny blog receives 10,000 spams in a year. Big sites receive 100 times the amount of spam. Basically, spammers are attacking the third Internet technology now:
- first they ruined usenet (news groups)
- then they made dealing with e-mail a pain in the rear
- and lastly (for now) they are going for web sites and are making blogging difficult, too (the same goes for forums, wikis, etc.)
They are putting the burden of their money making on the e-mail user (who needs spam filters) and the blog/web site owner (who, too, needs spam filters), and so on, and so forth. I hate those bastards. Let’s hope they die out some day. Unfortunately, I’m afraid there’s simply too much money to be made with not much financial risk or any (serious) legal implications.
