Askismet: a blogger’s life-saver

Life has been extremely busy and draining for me lately – especially work.

So it’s nice to have Akismet on the blog comment-spam case. Just from the weekend, it caught 514 comment spams … so I didn’t have to. If you don’t have Akismet, and you blog, you need it.

(If you allow comments, that is. Whether a blog without comments is a blog or not we’ll leave for another day!)

Total comment spams caught on this blog are now 11,437. That’s over 11,000 spams that I didn’t even have to glance at!

Assuming each would only take me 5 seconds to check and approve or delete, that’s almost 16 hours of my life that Akismet has saved me. Wow.

(Of course, without it, I’d simply be forced to turn off comments. Which would not be cool.)

If you take a look at the “spam zeitgeist” on Akismet’s home page, you’ll see that as of tonight (June 13), Akismet has some pretty impressive statistics:

  • 67,664,249 spams caught so far
  • 135,846 so far today
  • 93% of all comments are spam

It’s getting to the point that, as good as WordPress is already, Akismet is one of the key reasons why anyone who blogs should use it. It’s almost never wrong … because as everyone uses it, the “wisdom of masses” means that it’s very, very intelligent about what is spam and what isn’t.

[tags] akismet, comment spam, splogs, spam, matt wullenberg, wordpress, john koetsier [/tags]