The milestone number of one billion spams trapped by Akismet was reached a few hours ago.
There’s been some good guessing during the past few days on when this figure would be reached. It was a discussion point in last Thursday’s FIR, for instance. My best guess was that it would be sometime this weekend. Well, that wasn’t wrong.
The more alarming statistic in all this is that 95% of all comments and trackbacks to blogs are spam. So with one billion spams, there are just over 53,000 53 million genuine comments (genuine as in the comments not being 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.
It’s a war, people!
Your math is a little off, Neville — but Matt Mullenweg deserves credit not just for WordPress, but an Akismet tool that slams spams on a variety of Social Media systems.
I’m no math major, but I think there’s a big “three-zero” error here. My calculator tells me that, if there have been one billion “spams” and that 95 percent of all comments are spam, we’re looking at fifty million legitimate comments, not fifty thousand.
Anyone else care to check the math? I think it makes a big difference to a lot of us.
You’re both right and thanks for pointing out my maths slip. It is of course 53 million not 53,000.
A bit of a difference indeed, Mike! The number quoted in the post duly amended.