Just done a bit of an experiment. I deleted a load of spam comments from the blog yesterday at 6am and this morning gone back in and counted the little critters again. In just over 24 hours I’ve picked up another 606 spam comments. There may be some legit ones in there but they ain’t gonna be seen amongst the dross (sorry yawl).
It’s basically around 25 spam comments an hour. We never see spam emails any more, at least not when using gmail. This isn’t entirely true as I do get crap from “seo experts” who address me as “Hi” and quote the “can spam act” in the footer. They always get labelled as spam (may have mentioned this before but it’s an ongoing situation).
I’m sure the 25 spam comments an hour far exceeds the rate of spam emails when we used to get them. Although this spam is mostly captured (Akismet) you do have to occasionally remember to permanently delete it or it would start filling up the server.
In the way you used to get quotes about the size of the global email spam problem it would be interesting to look at the equivalent stats for comments.
The pics below show zero comments initially then 616 a day later. There is something very satisfying about pressing the “empty spam” button. It’s a bit like driving down a clear motorway when there is a 10 mile tailback going the other way.
I wonder what the clickthrough rate for a spam comment is. Must be infinitesimally small. You would have to be paticularly stupid to click on one of the links.
Other spam related posts:
Louis Vuitton spam
London Book Fair 2014 – unsubscribe spam
Spam blocking strategies
