Akismet blog spam statistics

Regular readers will know that I'm a fan of WordPress, and in fact I use it on all my blogs.

With WordPress 2.0 came the Akismet plug-in, designed to catch and prevent spam from making it to your comments and ergo your blog posts. It is exceedingly effective - on just one of my sites, I trap about 300-400 comments a day, and over 6,500 over the course of the last three months.

Akismet is a network enabled verification/checking system that shares information about marked spam with a central server. As well as improving the quality of the spam filter, it also means that they can get spam statistics for all of the Akismet enabled sites that use the service.

The people behind Akismet have created a statistics page that shows this information, including a daily running counter, and an idea of the amount of the ham (false positives).

As with all such statistics, it provides that unsettling combination of fascinating data with the disturbing feeling that we are drowning in spam and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.