Over 90% of blog comments are spam, reports Akismet |
Loading ...Matt notes that blog comment antispam tool Akismet is now sharing its ham and spam stats on a special page:
These numbers seem more realistic to me than other reports on comment spam. I’d say the numbers for targeted PR blogs are more like 95%+ are spam, at least according to our own filters. Akismet is free to blogs that do less than $500 USD/month in revenue and was first reviewed at Hmm in December and then mentioned the false positive concerns to Matt directly at Northern Voice in February.
I used Akismet on my blog for the first few months and it was very good at catching my comment spam. I switched a few months ago to Dr. Dave’s Spam Karma 2 and I just can’t say enough good things about it.
What inspired me to switch had less to do with Akismet’s effectiveness than it did its interface. At some point the number of comment-spams on my blog exceeded 150 per day, but Akismet’s interface only allowed me to review the most recent 150. This meant that if a real comment got mis-tagged as spam, and it was more than 150 entries ago, I couldn’t retrieve it to un-tag it.
At any rate, Akismet did me well while I used it. I’m not bad-mouthing it at all. Now that I’ve gone on to Spam Karma 2, though, I just can’t see ever going back.
Found your blog on FortyFaces.com, in case you’re interested in this sort of thing.
Comment by Richard Harlos — May 22, 2006 @ 12:54 pm PST
Hi Richard, thanks for stopping by and sharing your perspective. I took a look at Forty Faces here.
Comment by TDavid — May 22, 2006 @ 12:56 pm PST
I’ve never used Akismet. I’ve used Spam Karma since day 1 and really like it. The interface is easy enough to use and haven’t had any false positives.
Comment by ^Lestat — May 22, 2006 @ 2:15 pm PST
hehe, I thought it was much higher. I think I block more than 9 of 10 posts right now because it’s obvious spam and still at least 50% of my comments are spam
Comment by Randy Charles Morin — May 22, 2006 @ 3:57 pm PST
I wonder if the stats are somewhat like the number of “serious” and “critical” viruses reported by virus sotware developers - the bigger the problem the greater the call for their products…
Generally I’ve found that basic comment validation is all that’s needed to reduce comment spam to virtually nothing…
Comment by iiq374 — May 22, 2006 @ 6:05 pm PST