I am pretty sure its not just me…. but from the time i started this blog 3 months ago (Unleashing the TechRONnati Spirit!) i am starting to feel those spammers coming into my blog! Tsk tsk tsk… not a good thing but i’ll get used to this eventually.

Thank goodness there’s Akismet which is short for: “Automattic Kismet” -> cool right? . It’s a blogging spam filter tool from wordpress. For those still unfamiliar, Akismet is an automated spam killer for blogging systems. Its a blog service which WordPress is currently using …for sure a lot of us who are into blogging and using WordPress…they are familiar with this. I can really attest to its effectiveness. Just today i just deleted more or less 50 spams comments on my blog.  This really works!!! I just dont know if other free blogging systems out there have something like this. Akismet works like this…. When a new comment, trackback, or pingback comes to your blog it is submitted to the Akismet web service which runs hundreds and thousands of tests on the comment and returns a thumbs up or thumbs down. Now,  based on the akismet help guide…

when the plugin catches something as spam it saves it in the database for 15 days in case you want to check it out manually and then automattically deletes it. In the unlikely event something gets incorrectly identified as spam you can correct it and it submits the “false positive” back to Akismet for analysis and improvement of the ystem. If a spam comment happens to get through and you mark it as spam within WordPress, it does the same thing. Akismet becomes more effective the more you use it.

In the last 3 years that Akismet has been running, it has already caught over 6,330,937,480 spam comments, trackbacks and pingbacks while only just over 6 Million legitimate comments got thru. Now that’s a BILLION Akismet Spam Messages!.  The numbers speaks for itself — 89% of blog comments are spam (and that’s just thru Akismet). How about other tools out there??  The figure was around 64% when it was beta-tested in October 2005. You can see the trend escalating every month and I think its not surprising if this figure closes in to almost 98% by end of the year 2008. Oh and by the way, that’s just from spam bots. How about real people trolling around blogs out there trying to get the latest tidbits of your blog updates? Check out Akismet’s Live Spam Zeitgeist Statistics. The figures are there!!!!

Live Spam Zeitgeist

6,330,937,480 spams caught so far (as of June 9, 2008  )

6,194,883 so far today (as of June 9, 2008 )

89% of all comments are spam (as of June 9, 2008 )

If you’re running Akismet and you see spam getting thru, don’t just delete them. Tag them as spam so Akismet will learn from its mistake.

See the the orange demographics above? They are all spams coming in to your blog!!!!! The blue once are legitimate sources/comments – known as HAM there in the image. (Not Bacon -ok.. hehe.. now am hungry!)

Please visit this youtube tutorial for the newbies, I am pretty sure, you will learn something from this.

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