Ajit Gaddam: TechNews and Security

As I blogged earlier, Akismet has passed a huge milestone today. It has crossed 1 Billion Comment Spam blocked a few hours ago.

Besides me, a lot of people have been guessing on when this milestone would be reached and as guessed, it was reached over the weekend. As outlined in the picture below, two stats stand out below the chart. One is Total Spam blocked which at the point of this screenshot stood at 1,024,961,562 and the other stat is Total Ham which stood at 54,169,936. What this statistic reveals is that an alarming 95% of all the comments and trackbacks to blogs such as this one are spam. So with a Billion spams blocked, there are just 54 million genuine comments (genuine comments or total ham are those which are not identified by Akismet as spam)

The only sure way right now to avoid spam is to not allow any form of commenting or connection to your blog from any other site on the internet. Which would defeat one of the primary benefits of a blog: connecting with other people.

I wouldn’t do that. So I rely on Akismet as the first line of spam defence and it does a very good job.