On January 5th, 2006 I turned on the Akismet WordPress plugin for filtering comments and trackbacks. It wasn’t perfect (one month review showed ~ 0.1875% false positives) and went down a couple of times, but after one year I’d say it is good enough. After a couple of months the volume of spam was so high that I stopped going through the spam queue, hoping that anyone with a comment that never showed up would contact me to tell me about it.
Any comments marked as spam by Akismet are deleted after 15 days. That doesn’t seem like a very long time, but on this blog that queue is over 10,000 comments lately. I can’t imagine having to review more than 20,000 comments every month. Ug.
After one year my WordPress dashboard indicates that Akismet has blocked more than 112,000 comments and trackbacks as spam.
UPDATE Sat 6 Jan 2006 @ 7:30am : Wouldn’t you know it, the next morning after writing this Akismet let some 50 or so obvious comment spam get through. Looks like they were having problems around 3am, all of these comments came in at about that time. So it isn’t perfect, but I wouldn’t even think of turning it off.