January 15, 2007
Comment Spam on the rise
As with email spamming and Usenet spamming in the nineties, blog comment spamming is on the rise as more people get easier access to the tools, and more lists of blogs, etc are made available. I haven’t seen statistical evidence, but I would assume the effectiveness of the actual spam, and the spams actually getting through to recipients or blog comment areas are in a reverse curve to these broadcast statistics, as more and more software tools for each style and type of spam get released.
Take for example, this humble blog. In a blog post way back 74 days ago, I showed a screengrab of Akismet, the auto comment spam plug in, showing 28,586 spams caught. Now, only two months later, I hit the 100,000 milestone a few days ago, and am currently sitting on 102,884 spams, or 74,298 spams in the last 74 days.
This seems similar to what most blogs are receiving, looking at the recent curve on the Akismet Zeitgeist.
You can see further evidence of spam in general, over at Commtouch’s live graph. A good list of anti-spam options for blogs is available on this Wikipedia entry.
Image: screen grab from blog admin panel.
