It’s old news for the big bloggers, but for me its somewhat novel- the sheer volume of spam comments to my blog is growing at an amazing pace. You don’t see the spam in my comments because I both use Akismet [1] (the spam filter for WordPress 2.x blogs) and moderate all comments. But here is what I have observed on this very blog you are reading right now:
- Total spam comments between July 2005 and January 1, 2006: approximately 50
- Spam comments from January 2006 to May 7: approximately 1500
- Spam comments from May 7 to today: approximately 1700
- Spam comments from January to Yesterday (five months) that made it past Akismet and that I had to manually moderate: about 70
- Spam comments today that made it past Akismet and that I had to manually moderate: 25
I think I sense a trend here…and its not a happy one. I’m up in the 100 spam comments a day range now, and its not unreasonable to expect 200 a day by the end of the year. I wonder if the law of diminishing returns will start to kick in for the services generating the comments?
What I’m describing is an old story on the Internet…wasting other people’s time and money is far too easy. I’m kind of hopeful that the fact that bloggers and makers of blog software like WordPress have learned from what happened with email, and the filters will clamp down more effectively on the junk early in the process. Akismet works pretty well, and if every blogger/blog tool has something similar up and running now or within the next couple of months that might be a good start. If that were to happen,
perhaps the questionable business model upon which blog spamming is based would simply dry up and blow away in the wind.
Yeah, I’m being optimistic- but I can hope, can’t I?
UPDATE: I may be optimistic, but I’m not stupid. I have installed Bad Behavior [2] (to block spam attempts before they even create a comment) and BBStats [3](to show Bad Behavior’s activity)