Swandives

Sad but true. Here’s a snapshot from Akismet livestats with, gasp, 22 hours to go for the day!

* 6,375,115,334 spams caught so far
* 551,189 so far today
* 89% of all comments are spam

That’s right - 89% of all comments are spam. How awful is that?! Worse is that spam comments obviously work, else that figure wouldn’t be so high. And what I find so malignant about it all is that it drowns out the real conversations. In that respect, spam really does live up to its namesake, a la the Monty Python skit.

Akismet’s tracking shows exponential growth in spam since it began tracking in 2005 and while stats can always be argued (such as the increases in efficiency of weeding out comments since the service began, the level to which the stats are tied to Wordpress and so on), the trend is hard to ignore. Real comments (which Akismet calls ‘ham’) are also growing, but nowhere near spam levels.