Since installing the Akismet plugin for WordPress just over one month ago it has processed caught more than 1600 pieces of spam. Most of these are sent via trackback/pingback, although there are those still submitting comment spam. That brings the daily average to more than 50. But really those aren’t the most important numbers to look at.
What we really want to know is how good is Akismet at figuring out what is spam and what isn’t it. It can fail to two ways. The first way to to let items that should have been marked as spam through, we’ll call that a miss. The other way it can fail is to identify a valid comment/trackback/pingback as spam, lets call that a false hit. So here is the break down for the last 31 days with 1600 plus pieces of spam processed via Akismet:
- Misses: 23 (~ 1.4375 percent)
- False Hits: 3 (~ 0.1875 percent)
Both of those percentages are pretty small. Unfortunately the false hit category in general concept is worse than the miss category. The worst thing that happens with a miss is that you have to mark items as spam. Having false hits around means that you have constantly be scanning the spam list to make sure that valid comments/pingbacks/trackbacks didn’t get tagged incorrectly.
My conclusion after one month of use? Pretty good, I give it a thumbs up. As long as you realize it isn’t going to be perfect I say go for it. For now I won’t go into the whole issue of having to ship off all of your comments/trackbacks/pingbacks for spam processing other than to be aware of it.
Keep up the good work Akismet. Hopefully future reviews will see those percentages drop even lower.
2 replies on “Akismet Review”
Hmmm your missed is much higher than it should be, I’ll check out why this may be.
[…] It has been about six weeks since I wrote my review of Akismet. Things had been going fine, but the last week or so has seen a large increase in the number of comment spam items that are not being caught, especially the yesterday and today. I’ve asked about this via their contact form to see if this is something unique to me or if there is something going on at Akismet. […]