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Jeff Chandler

Akismet Celebrates Huge Spam Blocking Milestone

Akismet Spam Counter

Akismet is celebrating a huge milestone today. According to its spam counter, it has now blocked over 100,000,000,000 spam messages. Not all of that spam has originated from WordPress powered websites. Thanks to a number of libraries and an API, Akismet can be used on different content management systems as well as services.

Installing Akismet Helpers

While Akismet has saved me a ton of time, ever since I added two plugins to this website to go in front of Akismet, it’s been much more effective. I’ve installed Cookies for comments and Simple Trackback Validation. The results speak for themselves. But don’t take my word for it. Justin Tadlock wrote about his experience using these two plugins and he considered Cookies for comments one of his top 5. Another plugin worthy of trying is WP-Hashcash. While you may notice the two-year update notice on the WP-Hashcash and Simple Trackback Validation plugin pages, I can assure you that both work with WordPress 3.7.

Share How Much Spam Akismet Has Blocked

If you use the Jetpack plugin by Automattic, you’ll be able to use the Akismet widget. Browse to Appearance – Widgets and locate the Akismet Widget under the available widgets area. There are no options since the only thing it does is show people visiting your site how much spam has been blocked. While green is the color of Akismet, it doesn’t look great on every website. Also, since there is no padding underneath the spam count, it gives the appearance that the widget is broken.

Spam Blocked On WPTavern

Don’t mind the number because it’s wrong. Since the launch of WPTavern, the counter has been reset a few times. With WordPress powering 20% of the web and multiple services able to tie into Akismet, it shouldn’t take nearly as long to reach 200,000,000,000. I just hope this site doesn’t take the brunt of that number!

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6 responses to “Akismet Celebrates Huge Spam Blocking Milestone”

  2. Jeffro

    In the past few weeks I have experience a sharp decline in the spam that I receive. It is literally down to a fraction of what I previously received. I am wondering if everyone else has been experiencing this?

    I connected to wordpress.com via Jetpack, is this what is responsible? It would make a lot of sense if it is.

    Akismet, to my knowledge, is my lone defense against spam and it is does a great job, saves so much needless hassle.

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  3. Hi Jeff,

    I can’t really say of the same thing on my blog. When I launched my new blog, it came preconfigured with Akinsmet plugin, but was not active unless I get the API key which has to do with purchasing the key, however, I could not.

    I removed it and installed other plugins to do similar thing ( Capthca checker plugin), GASP e.t.c. but it is not showing up on the page, and hence not doing what they are supposed to do. I manually had to be deleting at least 2-4 spammy comments every day.

    Could the problem be from my theme?

    The blog in question is:
    http://bloggingconsult.org/

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  4. One one of my sites we would get anywhere from 150-250 spam comments a day, on a regular basis. Akismet would toss most of the into the spam bucket, but I hadn’t realized that my comments meta table was getting out of control because of how much info about comments Akismet was “tracking”.

    The helper plugin I started using was WP Conditional Captcha, because it came with a control to disable Akismet’s comment history instead of having to fiddle with admin.php as one thread on wp.org suggested. I did have to manually delete all that historical data from my database, approx 80Mb worth of useless comment meta cluttering up the mysql database ever since they’d added that “feature” to Akismet, and the history cleanup they added in didn’t (doesn’t?) work.

    I still get about 20-40 comments a day or so that I have to delete out of spam, maybe 5-10 per week that I have to manually mark as spam, but my database is still normal sized (for how old the site is), and my comments are mostly clean :)

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