By now, everyone should be acutely aware that I hate spam. In fact, I hate it that much that I think I’ve written about it every couple of months:

• Snail mail spam
• Akismet, friends forever
• Akismet, how I love thee
• Akismet spam filtering, the bringer of light

This time around it is no different, as Akismet just keeps on keeping on. I first installed Akismet toward the start of August 2006 as I was being overwhelmed by the volume of comment spam I was receiving. Initially, it was just one or two website spam messages but it soon increased at a rapid pace. I was receiving so much comment spam, I just couldn’t handle it manually anymore and I needed a way of stopping the spam for good.

After looking around at various WordPress comment spam filtering solutions, such as Bad Behaviour and Spam Karma; I ended up deciding on Akismet. There were a couple of reasons that I felt that Akismet was going to perform a better job stopping website spam, the main one being it was driven by the community. Spammers just love to prey on the masses and there sure is a mass of blogs on the internet. If the blogging community backed Akismet, then it seemed reasonable that as soon as enough bloggers flagged something as being spam – I wouldn’t have to worry about it either. As it turns out, this is absolutely the case as very few comment spam messages actually get through the Akismet filtering. I hate web site spam so much that I have comment moderation on as well; I know it might frustrate some commentors but I would prefer to vet a valid comment than see spam land on my site.

Akismet has now been protecting this site from website comment spam for approximately nine months and in that time it has successfully axed about 100,000 spam messages from ever appearing on the site. I can only imagine how hard it must be for people running web sites or forums these days that don’t have easy plugin access to a service like Akismet to stop website spam.

Pretty significant milestone I thought, go Akismet go!