I named blog spam catcher Akismet as one of the products I couldn’t live without in a post a few days ago. Today we hit the magic number - Akismet has captured over 1 million spam comments and trackbacks, just on TechCrunch. That’s over 1 million pieces of bogus content that we didn’t have to read, sort through manually and delete.
Akismet is a relatively easy plugin to install if you use Wordpress, and there are developer tools available if you want to use it on another blogging platform or website. If you have a blog, and don’t know about Akismet, take a minute and check it out.
See all
Post
You know askimet has a failure rate, right?
Yep, and I still love it.
Usually there is a good comment or two in every coupled hundred it marks as spam. While your site is huge, and has too many to read through I’m sure there are a lot of legit comments being filitered. =\
i’d think it’s quite unrealistic to expect any product to be 100% effective.
We glance through the thousands per day that we get and pull out as many as we can find. Usually its one every couple of days that shouldn’t have been marked as spam.
Sweet! Watch for the one I have been talking about today. I’m sure you have seen them before, but they jump on a digg item you have, and then use that url to go promo some porn site - http://rexduffdixon.com/?p=1234 - one snuck through earlier.
Rex
Akismet is great!
You can also check out a whole bunch more wordpress plugins that I have compiled over at The Blog Joint
it’s a good thing you don’t have a “crap filter” because then none of my worthless comments would make it through. cheers!
One major challange that still exists,
is the extra bandwidth that excessive comment spam consumes - whether or not, it gets on the blog.
Much of it is automated, so popular Bloggers have occassionally been shut down for excessive bandwidth usage above quota.
How long have you had Akismet installed? Just curious as to how long it took to get that much spam…
i actually don’t remember. early spring?
Last checked, I believe my caught spam was somewhere in the 5 to 10k region…Thank you akismet!
Anyone know what akismet’s translation in english is? Just curious.
Or is it even a real word?
I just switched my blog over to wordpress about a week ago ….wish i did it along time ago makes everything easier from bookmarking to installing plugins…and akismet is something i started using this week caught about 10-15…so far my blog is fairly new though…but we are definetly on the rise.
What a joke. I’ve spammed so many wordpress comment sites it’s not even funny. This plugin doesn’t help against someone who knows what they are doing.
Yes, Akismet is a real word. Roughly translated Akismet means by the will of God. It’s of Persian and Arabic origin and an article of faith in the Qur’an.
My count is 1,389 in total on my blog and more than 1000 on average in my mail. Would Akismet work for mail too?
No plans on Akismet for email, it’s really better for web stuff. It works great on contact forms though, which tend to get a lot of spam these days.
“Akismet” is a made-up word that had no hits on Google before we launched, “kismet” is a real word that I was first exposed to because it was a dice game I used to play as a child.
When my sister suggested it to me as a name for the product, the translation we had in mind matches pretty closely the one on the Wikipedia, “the magnetic attractive force that actualizes the playing out of karma; often used in the positive sense.”
My blog seems to be getting hits badly lately (as in being hit by spams). I owe akismet a lot for saving them
Matt if there was such a thing as Internet Knighthoods then you would deserve one.
For those that don’t know you do not need to use wordpress to use Askmet.
They have a great API and the chances are someone has done the heavy lifting for your fav programming language of choice http://akismet.com/development/
Have to totally agree. Even with registration turned on they still find a way. If it wasn’t for Akismet I wouldn’t be able to leave comments on at all. Its a fantastic service
i’m very satisfied. Without Akismet i wasn’t able to handle all the automatic spamming in nearly all formulars which are able to fill out. So serendipity-blog, gastbook, feedback-mails and forum will be very clean. So thanks a lot for saving time
It sure is a wonderful plugin. I think that it is installed by default with Wordpress. I found its failure rate to be very low.
Cool need to check that out.
http://www.tekno-world.blogspot.com
I love Akismet!! Greatest blog plugin ever!!
You mean you don’t want to read more about pie mature photos, or plane bipedal teens?
Yeah, we’ll be passing the 3M mark sometime this week. I am oh so happy to pay Automattic their fee for stopping that much crap. And, for those who care, our false-positive rate is 0.02%.
Akismet has saved me loads of time in my daily blogging routine. I used to have to sift through spam comments, spending way too much time deleting good for nothing spam, now Akismet does the sifting for me and I’m able to concentrate on other things. Sure, I find one or two non-spam comments in the spam area once and a while, but its well worth the sometimes false-positives!
Bad behaviour is much better than Akismet. There are very few spam comments caught by Akismet after I installed Bad behaviour.
When I moved my blog off of wordpress.com to my own self hosted wordpress site, the first plugin I activated was Akismet and within 1 day of moving this blog it had caught almost 50 spammed comments. I’m glad I went with this plugin.
Very useful plugin, have used it on my blog for a while and cant live without it now.
Spamspamspam ^^
And now, take a minute to remember all those usefull comments you’ve deleted with the spam.
i know, aksimet is pretty good. for heavens sake i haven’t such a big spam problem so i still look over the spam in akismet to be sure nothing has been spam-marked which shouldn’t have been.
Okay, Jeremy Wright(comment 28) says, their fals rate is is 0.02%. That means, you (maybe) have deleted 200 non-spam comments
Akismet is truly an amazing plugin. Perhaps one could mention it’s one of the plugins of the ‘Holy Trinity’ of spam fighting, together with Spam Karma and Bad Behaviour. Those three work great together, I have yet to notice one spam that slips through their nets.
Good Stuff. I just came back from a 2 week break and had to sort through 450+ some spam comments on a blog. Its definitely time to upgrade to an automatic solution. Thanks for the tip!
I generally agree that it’s a great time saver, however I’ve found that it’s not 100% accurate. Sometimes some valid comments do get marked as spam… Is it worth the time to do a manual filter? That’s another whole question
Regards,
Steph
I use LinkSleeve - seems to work as well, no API required either, which is nice. It uses XML-RPC, while Akismet uses REST, I think.
I used the PHP 4 class for Akismet, along w/a custom “blog” script, but where do I go to see the ones it caught as spam?
Why don’t you use the Bad Behavior Wordpress Plugin for spam?
http://www.homelandstupidity.u.....-behavior/
I started using Akismet when the spam started getting a bit silly on my blog. It’s truly legendary.
That said; does anyone know a Nigerian who needs help moving some money…
I have used askimet for a bit…..the time it saves is huge …..mind you i don’t have 1 million spam comments …but close to 3000 ….
In reference to the legit comments being marked as spam ….i have found one or two that have gotten thru. You can always go in and quickly skim thru them and pick out the ones that aren’t spam. Spammers make it really easy by not really changing the body of the post …just the address.
I wish askimet would create a feature that would fry the computers of the spammers ….is that too much to ask?
cheers
scott
I would love to see a completely free and fully open-source implementation of this; not some we-make-money-from-your-efforts hidden-blacklisting service.
Would you be able to provide a IP list captured with that million spam? If so, would you be interested in providing that list to me? I record a ban list of spam IP’s from the web sites that I run. The list is distributed to whoever is interested (click my name for the list). Your list would be helpful to me and people who uses my list. Thanks.
TechCrunch always has interesting technology tidbits. I will have to look into this one. Thanks for the blog
http://davidchao.typepad.com
I just saw them b/c of their affiliation with JS-Kit.
I coded a blog from scratch and put in my own spam catcher. I used to get 200 spam comments a day, but after putting in the my spam catcher its virtually zero now.
So anyone can actually create a spam catcher.
no biggie
I’m surprised that nobody has bothered to mention SK2 which has existed long before Akismet and which works much better IMO.
The best line of defence is to use SK2 and the Akismet Plugin for SK2. You have virtually zero spam.
And interestingly, for larger blogs I highly recommend using Math Plugin. It stops the spam even before Akismet. Ofcourse, then you can’t boast about how much spam SK2 has caught
Akismet is pretty awesome at filtering out spam but what annoys me about it is that I had to sign up for a completely useless and otherwise unrequired wordpress.com account. Akismet was created as an Wordpress plugin!! Why would anyone who downloaded and now hosts their own Wordpress blog need a Wordpress.com account?!
Now I have for no reason.
David,
“Okay, Jeremy Wright(comment 28) says, their fals rate is is 0.02%. That means, you (maybe) have deleted 200 non-spam comments”
And we check most of our 175+ blogs on a weekly basis for spam Akismet catches that were real comments. That said, I wouldn’t be surprised if, across the network, we’d lost 100 comments or so.
But that’s still less than 3-4 comments per blog per year. Not fantastic, and I wish we had those comments, but that kind of failure rate is pretty acceptable to me. Regrettable, but acceptable.
Nice! I love it as well. Even with a rather small failure rate it still better than processing 99.9% of spam. Until there’s a better one. I heart Akismet.
Chidade, signing up for a _free_ & seemingly annoying account is better than having to fork 400$ for a spam blocker. Sometimes we just have to be thankful. Thank open source. Happy New Year
Akismet is definitely one of those Wordpress tools that sets it far apart from others. Where i work they use some .NET thing called Community Builder and they’re hamstrung by this. It’s such a retrograde step moving into commercial software in the collaborative space!