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Akismet Numbers Paint Picture of Comment Spam

By Lyza Gardner

Published on November 15th, 2007

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I knew comment spam on blogs was a problem, but I didn’t know quite how much of one until I happened across Akismet’s Zeitgeist page recently.

Akismet is a comment spam protection service that is free to use for non-commercial use and integrated with popular blog software (e.g. WordPress, which we use at Cloud Four).

But I never knew the true numbers before: of the 3.67 billion comments Akismet has seen, only about 295 million are legitimate. That means only about 8% of all blog comments filtered through Akismet are legitimate. That’s kind of grim.

It makes me realize that having Akismet activated for my blog isn’t just a nice-to-have, but a must.