Written on October 8th, 2007 at 06:10 am by Darren Rowse
The Blog Tool that Has Saved Me Months of Work
The biggest single time saver in my blogging is a plugin that many of us take for granted – but which has literally saved me days and days of time.
What it’s done for me can be summed up in this little screen capture taken from the back end of ProBlogger:
Yes – last night the amount of spam comments that Akismet has filtered here at ProBlogger passed the ‘magical’ 2 million mark.
That’s a frightening statistic on numerous levels.
For starters it shows just how big the problem of comment spam is (I think I started using this about 18 months ago).
Also frightening is the thought of life without Akismet.
Lets do a little arithmetic and see what using it has done for my life:
Let’s assume that if I had to moderate spam comments manually here at ProBlogger that it would take around 2 seconds to do each one (I think it could be more than that as it can take a while to track them all down – I know this because when Akismet’s server has gone down for an hour or so it takes forever).
- 2,000,000 comment spams X 2 seconds = 4,000,000 seconds needed for moderating comments.
- 4,000,000 seconds = 66666.666667 minutes
- 66666.666667 minutes = 1111.111111 hours
- 1111.111111 hours = 46.2962 days
Akismet has saved me 46.29 days in the last 18 months. That’s 1.5 months (working non stop 24 hours a day).
Considering that I don’t work 24 hours a day – if I worked 8 hour days it would have taken me 138.88 days (4.6 months) to moderate all those comments manually – more if I took time off for weekends and holidays.
Do you think that I’m happy that I installed Akismet? You bet your life I am!
Update – as has been suggested in comments below – I would strongly encourage you to sign up as a commercial or ‘pro blogging’ users of Akismet if you’re making money from your blog. As part of b5media – ProBlogger uses a license that we pay for. This enables Akismet to keep improving.
82 Responses to “The Blog Tool that Has Saved Me Months of Work” - Add Yours
Siddharth Thakkar
October 8th, 2007 6:08 am
Phew!
2mn spam comments!
I have not thought about comment spam so seriously with most blog widgets showing the number of spam comments blocked in thousands (even that sounded unreal till TechCrunch published their figures). Akismet surely is a great tool for bloggers.
Thanks for sharing the amazing results on your site.
Siddharth Thakkar
October 8th, 2007 6:11 am
Oh! And by the way your analysis of the time saved is a great exemplification of your writing technique. You have proven your point and how!
Great stuff in terms of convincing your readers about the benefits of Akismet (not that many are not).
Cheers!
Caroline Middlebrook
October 8th, 2007 6:28 am
Wow that sure is a load of spam! I suppose with that amount you aren’t able to check it for real comments that got through are you? My blog is quite new and it’s only found around 100 or so messages so far but it’s caught a handful that weren’t spam too.
Jason
October 8th, 2007 6:29 am
Akismet is the best thing since Jesus.
Sean
October 8th, 2007 6:31 am
I don’t understand if the spams is done manually or by bots. I am guessing bot. I wonder why they aren’t smart enough to change their comment so that it doesn’t get detected.
bob cobb
October 8th, 2007 6:32 am
Works great for me too, once and a while it will pick up normal comments, but 99% of the time it doesnt
Leszek Pawlowicz
October 8th, 2007 6:38 am
I was seeing my Akismet spam increase with time to about 50 a day, but I stopped most of it by implementing reCaptcha:
http://recaptcha.net/
Not only decreased automated spam in Akismet by more than an order of magnitude (now typically 1-2 a day), but also serves a useful function.
Travis
October 8th, 2007 6:42 am
I guess that gives us all a goal now – you know you’ve made it big when you get 2 million spam comments!
Koen
October 8th, 2007 6:43 am
WHAT !? 2,000,000 !? That’s just… wow… I thought it was bad at such a popular site, but 2 million, no, I wouldn’t even dare to think about that.
But indeed, luckely there is Akismet. My site has the plugin working too, and cought 400 spam comments within 2 months. It’s just crazy, all those spam comments.
Sunny
October 8th, 2007 6:56 am
Is there any reason why you choose Akismet over Spam Karma 2? I am using SK2 because it gives people a 2nd chance in case they are accidentally registered as spam. Just curious about your reasoning.
Vik
October 8th, 2007 6:57 am
2 Million Spam comments, Wow, I just reached the 200th mark yesterday!Lol!
Well, although its a strange ambition Darren, but I would like to catch up with you soon, as More the number of Spam = More Popular the blog! ;-)
Dean @ Technical Itch
October 8th, 2007 7:10 am
Akismet does a great job, but the spambots will continue to evolve in efforts to bypass it.
One technique I’ve seen used recently is a comment containing one link. If you click on the link it takes you a forum thread containing dozens of spam links. Akismet is normally configured to only block a comment if it contains 2 or more links, since the comment only contains 1 link it can get past Akismet.
I’ve had to add a few words to my comments blacklist to block these – “viewtopic”, “newtopic”, “forum” and “board” have stopped these spam messages in their tracks :-)
Another spam technique I’ve seen recently is a comment containing one link which has tinyurl in the link name, which again links to a spam site.
Just goes to show how these spambots try to get pass the spam protection out there.
Terra Andersen
October 8th, 2007 7:12 am
This article was so helpful! I get spam every single day, and it’s so sad when you go to your admin and see comments to moderate… and then it’s spam. =(
James D Kirk
October 8th, 2007 7:16 am
I’ve recently also started using reCAPTCHA, more for the service of decoding those scanned words from books, than for the spam blocking service. Still, some spam comments do get by. And akismet captures them. Just approaching 100, so got a ways to go.
Wouldn’t it be interesting if there was some sort of metrics that allowed you to see the number of comment spams a site has over a period of time and compared that to their page rank, visitor counts, etc.? I believe the more popular a site the more spam comments it will get. That being said, I suppose you want to see high numbers of spam comments. Bring them on!
Ken Dahlin
October 8th, 2007 7:20 am
I’ve even heard of a site that claims to have reached the 100 million mark. Amazing how prevalent comment spam is these days. I’ve never researched it, but the spam tools must be incredibly easy for people to use to generate that much garbage.
nika
October 8th, 2007 7:21 am
Thats truckloads of spam sashimi and spam enchiladas.
I use akismet and spam karma 2.. I do not screen my caught spam because 1) I have never seen a mis-caught spam and 2) life is too short.
cmanlong
October 8th, 2007 7:33 am
Does anyone know of an implementation of Akismet for Blogger?
Phil
October 8th, 2007 7:34 am
A short while back my spam had almost come to a halt, I had Akismet wiping out anything on posts over a month straight away and Bad Behaviour doing the business on bots up front. There seems to have been a resurgence recently though.
2,000,000 spam is insane though, I’m climbing towards 20,000 at the moment, but then you’ve probably had that many real comments here.
Akismet is a life (and time) saver!
martin
October 8th, 2007 7:47 am
That is a lot of spam indeed. Now, could I interest you in some viagra?
Jake
October 8th, 2007 8:07 am
I have been continually shocked by the amazing amount of spam. I sure wish it wasn’t around, but it is and I am thankful for Akismet.
Alain
October 8th, 2007 8:19 am
Yes!!!
Akismet is amazing! Lots of spambots target my blog, typcially always the exact same post. I installed akismet last week and I haven’t had to manually filter more than a handful of spam messages.
Brad V.
October 8th, 2007 8:30 am
Wow, that’s a lot of spam! I guess I’m lucky because my blog is about literature and writing, which doesn’t seem to be targeted by spammers and spambots. Of course, my blog is still fairly new so I don’t get a lot of comments in general.
I wish Typepad had some of these cool plugins that Wordpress has!
Jeremy Steele
October 8th, 2007 9:10 am
Darren, how many comment spams do you get per day?
Stefan
October 8th, 2007 9:23 am
I have a simple math captcha, no askimet, and only about 1 spam every 10.000 visitors.
Life without Akismet – am I missing something…? ;-)
Rhea
October 8th, 2007 9:28 am
Oh, sweetie, I know what you mean! This tool has been like magic. I am only up to 40,000 or so. But one day…
Missylicious
October 8th, 2007 9:53 am
Wow, insane 2 million.
I still manually filter out spam. Sometimes Akismet still miss out 1 or 2 legit comments.
Jon - Art of Money
October 8th, 2007 10:05 am
Darren maybe you should link to the section on the Akismet site where they suggest that bloggers should actually pay for a commercial license if they are making money from their blog. Certainly your math calculations would suggest a positive ROI for a $50 investment and it is good to support a worthwhile project.
Max Powers at http://ConsumerFight.com
October 8th, 2007 10:28 am
Akismet? Another item for the newcomer to learn about. I can only dream of having so much spam. What will I learn about next?
I’m still trying to finish reading all the information here at Problogger in the hope of trying to catch up to all of you.
My thanks to Darren and all of you that have left comments as it has really helped me to learn more everday.
Aruni
October 8th, 2007 10:51 am
Akisment is great. I realized soon after I submitted my entry post for the Last 24 Hour compeition that instead of Google juice I should have put in the word Akismet in my little random poem. :-)
I still moderate but I don’t have near the traffic you do. I’ve seen a few Spam comments awaiting moderation so I’m playing around with the links feature. Most spam has two or more links but now there is spam with no links in the post or one that seem to get through.
If my traffic increases as a result of me participating in this contest and recently being named an SOB by Liz Strauss then I will probably have to quit moderating because I certainly don’t have an extra 4.6+ months available… :-)
Costa
October 8th, 2007 11:06 am
I don’t know why, but ever since I upgraded to Wordpress 2.3, Akisment seems to have lost it’s spam killing power. I’m quite sure I got the latest version, is there some other configurations required?
Chris Jacobson
October 8th, 2007 11:22 am
That’s a lot of spam. Akismet catches about 2 spam comments or so per day for me. :p
Jeremy Steele
October 8th, 2007 11:53 am
Costa, spammers have been using some slightly different methods since around the same time as 2.3. Give it a bit and it’ll go back to normal.
Josh
October 8th, 2007 11:58 am
I’m not surprised, given that it has caught almost 650 comments on my tiny little blog. I’m not sure if that’s counting from when I switched hosts in July or when I first installed wordpress for my blog in March, though. Either way, that’s a lot of spam.
The Dividend Guy
October 8th, 2007 12:58 pm
I use Spam Karma and Bad Behavior on my blog – the combination has helped reduce my comment spam greatly.
The Dividend Guy
Collin
October 8th, 2007 1:31 pm
Thats crazy is it fair to say I hate spam!
Mike Panic
October 8th, 2007 1:43 pm
I think the 2nd best thing I’ve done besides enabling Akismet is installing the did you pass math plugin that requires people who leave comments to do a simple math addition problem. Yes it impacts the user experience, but I don’t think it detracts from it so bad that it is not worth using. My one blog was getting 30-50 spam messages caught per day with Akismet, the number has been reduced to 5 or under per day since installing the math plugin.
Rob Schultz
October 8th, 2007 1:58 pm
Wow! That number is simply staggering! It’s always the simple tools that are easy to forget about, but its also these tools that let me sleep peacefully at night.
David Cheong
October 8th, 2007 2:01 pm
2million, we are talking about 2mil, those bot/spammer really doesn’t given up easily. Long live akismet. Its a good thing that you’ve installed the plugin, darren.
entrepreneur stories
October 8th, 2007 5:20 pm
2 million comment spam! wow that’s really impressive because it means you have a lot of traffic. Thanks for akismet. I really hate those spam because it will take a lot of your productive time.
But I am caught
October 8th, 2007 9:40 pm
yes Darren..many of those comments in those caught are my own.. somehow akismet is catching my blog www[dot]nofullstop[dot]com as spam and I am not able to comment on many blogs..
almost all as all use akismet..
I figured that akismet was catching the internal back links which I was leaving from my posts to other posts of mine as spam so I marked them as “not spam” but nothing has improved since then..
Lara told me that she saw in your spam list another name Salman spamming the comments so it might be the reason why my comment was being caught..so I tried other names to comment but whenever I enter my blog URL then it has to get caught in the spam list..
What to do??? I AM NOT A BOT :(
I hope this one dose not gets stuck there…
Iantrepreneur
October 8th, 2007 11:56 pm
I use bad behavior and akismet and both work great hand in hand – I still get some that bypass both but its better than working 8 hours to just filter spam
Tim Broder
October 8th, 2007 11:58 pm
Thanks a lot for the tip. I’m going to have to look at it when I get home though as its blocked here at work
David Bradley
October 8th, 2007 11:58 pm
Yep, my Sciencebase site passed the million mark a while back, certainly astounding how deeply runneth the crapflood. I used the Auntie Spam greasemonkey script in Firefox so that I can quickly scan a random page for false positives. But, in recent weeks have all but given up on that as Akismet very, very rarely captchas genuine comments mistakenly
daveb
Googlelady
October 9th, 2007 2:04 am
Nice analysis here, Akismet is a MUST in all bloggers.
India Business Blog
October 9th, 2007 2:07 am
My dashboard shows “Akismet has protected your site from 59,323 spam comments.” and that is in nearly 6 months….so at an average 10k pm, 330 per day…Wow
analogstuff
October 9th, 2007 2:44 am
Hi Darren,
You are providing too good information. I have made your blog as my homepage. I really dont know that there are options even to screen spam messages.
what world am i living ?? :)))
Jack @ The Tech Teapot
October 9th, 2007 2:59 am
Think of all of the spammers you’ve consigned to the poverty line. Don’t you feel guilty that you’ve forced them to actually work for their success?
bill weaver
October 9th, 2007 3:27 am
Comment spam drives me nuts, but Askimet has done a great job of restoring some sanity to my life. In my experience, however, Askimet has been missing more spam lately.
Just a nit, but did you really spend two seconds on each spam comment? Without Askimet, there’s so much spam that breezing through dozens of spams is a matter of eyeballing similar visual patterns and only looking closely at the unique ones. Still takes a long time, but two seconds?
Adam Kayce : Monk At Work
October 9th, 2007 4:36 am
Ditto on using Akismet along with Bad Behaviour — Akismet was leaking a few through, but Bad Behaviour is fantastic.
I had some problem with SpamKarma2… could’ve been my theme, but I’m not sure. Lots of legit folks I know getting all kinds of error messages.
Chess Teaching
October 9th, 2007 4:48 am
2 million comment spam! You must hae a very popular and interesting site for spammers. I suppose this has to be related to the number of visiters or at least to the number of visiters according to the spammers.
Kim
October 9th, 2007 5:20 am
Wow… 2 million… Askimet is great. I use it in conjunction with “comment timeout”. You can configure it to close comments after a certain amount of time. I set it for 30 days and then after that, any comment goes directly into moderation. Before installing it, I got to over 1,200 very quickly. I have only had approximately139 more since then (I have had “comment timeout” installed for 6 months now”. While my site is not even a fraction of the traffic of this one, I don’t like having to search for legit comments.
Jeffro2pt0
October 9th, 2007 6:35 am
Holy cow. I almost never want to be as popular as Problogger.net if thats what we have to look forward to. Akismet has caught at least 1,300 spam on my blog and occasionally, it misses a few but so far, it’s done a dandy of a job.
Sean Epperson
October 9th, 2007 7:02 am
Wow this plugin came free with the my Wordpress install but I have not turned it on yet due to just starting up. I take it that I should turn it on now, or wait until I know what comments are valid ones? I love the ideas here and I am certainly open to using them. Thanks alot.
Slevi
October 9th, 2007 7:20 am
Hehe, a magical figure indeed. With most bloggers still seeing an increase in the daily amount of spam received I wouldn’t be surprised if here the case as well, how long would it take before the magical 5 million would be reached ;).
Akismet is definitely the best thing next to sliced bread :P.
Nick Georgakis
October 9th, 2007 7:59 am
2 million. An Impressive and horrifying amount of spam!
Paul Goscicki
October 9th, 2007 8:11 am
46.2962 days of work or 2-3 hours for a skillful coder to write custom captcha plugin that will do the trick just fine.
Not that I don’t use Akismet myself (53K and counting), sure I do. I just don’t have the urge to write that captcha plugin…
Michael Boateng
October 9th, 2007 8:44 am
Wow …. that shows how spammers even see problogger as a haven for marketing … Interesting isn’t it …
I am going to get it up asap.
Thanks Darren
Edrei
October 9th, 2007 8:47 am
Well, you could install the Bad Behavior plugin as well to combat spam. Bad Behavior denies automatedspambots before they have a chance to even access your page. While it’s a bit dated, it still works hand in hand to spammers. I find that with BB, The amount of spam Akismet has to deal with goes down. That alone makes it better to sift through any false positives.
I’d recommend anyone try it really.
Douglas Karr
October 9th, 2007 8:47 am
It would be much less if you loaded up Bad Behavior.
I’m not trying to be a jerk – I LOVE WordPress – but the same guys that built the mouse trap built the hole that the mice are running into 2,000,000 at a time. Is this really something to brag about?
Rodrigo Brito
October 9th, 2007 9:32 am
Good way to prevent spam
Kimmono
October 9th, 2007 9:49 am
Aksimet has been great for me too. But what to do with a blog that has over 300k spam comments already inside the system? Aksimet does not help with that. Anyone got a suggestion?
Zit Seng
October 9th, 2007 10:00 am
I think some of the other anti-spam tools, such as ones that require humans to interpret an image and type out the word/number, does a long way too. At least automated spam bots would not work. For example, I use Peter’s Custom Anti-Spam (http://www.theblog.ca/?p=21) in combination with Askimet.
Andrew
October 9th, 2007 11:16 am
I recently started my new WordPress blog the other day, and I’m yet to receive any spam at all. I’m dreading the day that it starts but I’m ready with Akismet already installed/activated.
One of my other blogs has caught over 200 spam comments so far with a high success rate. No comments have been caught that are legitimate, and none that were spam have passed through.
I have written a little article about the Akismet plugin if anyone is interested.
CatherineL
October 9th, 2007 1:29 pm
I thought I got a heap of spam, but I would be really annoyed if I had to delete all that.
bill weaver
October 9th, 2007 1:54 pm
@Kimmono, if you are talking about 300K spam awaiting moderation when you enable Askimet, just click “Recheck Queue for Spam” in the upper right of the Moderation Queue page. Might take forever to process.
Carlo Selorio
October 9th, 2007 5:00 pm
Yep, I too use Akismet and its by far the best tool to use… since I don’t have to worry about spam comments to my blog. I use to spend a lot of time removing it one by one.
Cheers,
Carlo
Greg
October 9th, 2007 5:18 pm
Yikes – thats a big chunk of time to be doing something better with life. I did the same sums with my own blog and have been saved 19.47 hours. Not bad for the $5 a month subscription i pay.
I use Akismet with the Bad Behavior plugin, the later which stops a lot of the spammers even getting as far as being caught by Akismet
dewaji
October 9th, 2007 7:12 pm
wew…. thats a big number of spam. I allready use akismet too
n-blue
October 9th, 2007 8:26 pm
Well, Indeed, if your have (presumably) 20 spams in same time you just take 2 second to demis them.
Btw, Akismet is great tool and I love it.
David
October 10th, 2007 12:36 am
Wow 2 million spam comments?! imagine the bandwidth/storage they could have eaten
Kimmono
October 10th, 2007 4:33 am
bill weaver: Aksimet just times out on large chunks of spam, but
I sorted out the spam waiting to be moderated. The problem is all that spam that is already inside the system. 300k of spam already in posts. Got any idea on how to fix that?
tabs
October 10th, 2007 4:41 am
Sorry. Too many false positives for me. We took Akismet out of our installs.
Sue
October 10th, 2007 5:03 am
Like Zit Seng, I also use akismet in conjunction with Peter’s Custom Anti Spam. Between the two, I don’t have to deal with it, and can even leave comment moderation off. I work 12 hour days at my regular job, and don’t want to leave comments (when I get some) sitting around awaiting moderation for that long. The captcha stops the bots before they even get to akismet, and yet with that, akismet still manages to catch several each day. That and blocking certain IPs that keep on trying does the job.
Dogs Of Chinatown
October 10th, 2007 5:31 am
Rightfully said and like you we just don’t have time for the nonsense. We all have way to much work to do but love the interactivity with our fans.
Lorelle
October 11th, 2007 9:52 am
I’m heading towards that 2 million mark fast, too, Darren, and I have to tell you, Akismet is a great time saver, but the newly updated Akismet Auntie Spam Firefox Greasemonkey Script makes processing Akismet spam a breeze. Engtech of Internet Duct Tape makes each new version better than the last with powerful features.
The last version included separating the single comment spam posts, unique (so to speak) comments, from the “hammer comment spammers”, the ones who redundantly spam 5, 10, or 100s of the same comment spams. Instead of being tied to frequent checks for false/positives, I need only scroll the list of unique comment spams and ignore the multiple comment spam redundancies.
Akismet with Auntie Akismet is truly brilliant as a time and work saver!
David Russell
October 18th, 2007 7:39 am
I’m not sure if life without Akismet would be as bad as you think (speaking personally, I would just go back to using the nearly-as-effective Spam Karma 2), but it is certainly one of only a couple of Wordpress plugins that can be described as ‘essential’ (the other being Bad Behaviour).
efrain
October 24th, 2007 6:06 pm
holy crap. 2million? dang. although my commentage is almost zero, I have experience in receiving spam commentage on another site and boy is it annoyingly frustrating. Akismet is awesome.
:: efrain
Alex D
May 27th, 2008 7:46 pm
Lucky number :)). Akismet for the win!
Notebooki
July 14th, 2008 10:27 pm
2 milion spam comments? lol
GT
May 19th, 2009 12:38 am
I better install this before it’s too late :D
Dutil
June 5th, 2009 11:48 am
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, and I end up with more questions than I start with hehe. Interesting take…don’t think I would’ve come up with that one on my own.
Cookman
June 20th, 2009 2:14 pm
Thanks for sharing this. Great!
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