gor[b] Paul Gorbould: Words and Pictures

3,000 comments of spam on the wall

A brief prayer of thanksgiving to the tech gods before I resume my usual blather (and no, this isn't one of those "sponsored posts" - ick.)

Akismet, an indispensable spam-catcher for blogs, has now protected my blog from exactly 3,000 form spam comments - spambots that attempt to post junk messages in the comments area of this blog and others.

Sometimes these are obvious spam, like you get in your e-mail - links to porn sites, diet pills, etc. Sometimes they are more clever - the comments say something like, "Great information! I like your site design" - but the user name links back to a spam website. Sometimes they contain rather racy (and sometimes funny) jokes, then a link to spam.

Akismet is a filter that comes with WordPress which recognizes these comments as spam, and quarantines them for you. As you verify whether or not something is really spam, it learns from your decisions and becomes uncannily accurate.

According to their official stats, Akismet has caught almost one billion spams (and, on the down side, 53 million legitimate messages.) Their numbers indicate that 95 per cent of all comments are spam.

On my site, Akismet has a better success ratio: Of the 3,000 comments it caught, perhaps 10 were not spam, and it allowed perhaps three spam comments onto my blog. And those were early on - it doesn't make many mistakes any more (though it seems to frequently mark Peter J's comments for moderation because he often includes multiple links, which I appreciate.)

(By the way, Maxpower has a very interesting blog post about what happens when Akismet incorrectly thinks you are a spammer and sends you to "spam jail" - and how this knowledge could be used for evil.)

In the meantime, I'm afraid you'll continue to miss out on entries like the following, which were repelled today:

penus enlargement
veagra
farmacology
Hi.. like your sit, congrats !!
huyaks
services of the lawyer
22 lady leg plus
sexy ebony hoe
womens coolmax underwear
Please, do not delete the given message. Money obtained from spam will go to the help hungry to children uganda
Intresting information about teeny angels model.
The bass head tab talking
Eye of adult female furry art
Your guestbook is example of middle-class guestbooks. Congratulation!
Just Who Has Strong Heart Can Enter This Wonderful Site…WWERAW
Approved articles about topless totty.

But I'm sure you can find other sites for that without much difficulty.