What I wake up to every day

In the mornings if I have time I usually turn on the laptop and check the blog as well as check my emails, and sometimes visit the BBC News website, because you know it’s good to be updated on what your waking up to. But like I said I usually login into the admin panel on James’ Blog to do some checks as well reply to any comments or to finish that post I was working on last night and I’m always greeted with the same annoying sight everyday as soon as I’ve logged in…

This is a window that appears on the front page of my admin panel. Notice the spam part. This is powered by something called Askimet which is a spam prevention tool, and Askimet is avaliable as a plugin to install on WordPress blogs (And can also be used in other instances) But everyday when I login the number of spam comments sitting in the spam queue seems to be increasing. I mean at first it was like one or two spam comments, and thats fine, we all get spam but as James’ Blog turns 3 months old on November the 22nd it’s already being attacked by spam and double figures of spam start to creep in on a daily basis.

A interesting graph provided by the plugin paints a picture for us all:

You can see since the beginning of the website there was barely any spam at all. Normal behaviour as the website had not got many link backs or wasn’t properly in search engine results, but it only takes a month before spam takes to really hit the blog and in the closing weeks of October there was a record hit of spam. In the current month of november we can start to see a trend again, the spams calmed down, but now it’s starting to follow the pattern of october and looks set to rise again.

The spam that Askimet catches is nearly 100% correct and the actual figure is close to about 98% it’s a wonderful plugin and does a brilliant job in stopping it all but the spam I get is also really obvious, annoying, contains non-generic dialogue and is just down right pointless, here’s a screenshot of some of the spam comments Im getting hit by each day:

As you can see, obviously computer generated text with no meaning to a human being just loads of links that lead to some porn, scam or just annoying website that everyone shunned many years ago.

Better still I got a spam comment today and it was about computerised bots and how to use them to post comments automatically on sites! Oh great now the spam comments are informing others about spamming others! But it made me wonder, without askimet, or any spam prevention tool for that matter. How would we actually stop these spam comments from getting through. I mean without spam blockers, us ourselves would be the spam removers spending valuable time comment moderating, manually going through comment after comments checking is authenticity and properties. Making you wonder without spam prevention systems would anyone be blogging right now, or just be removing the spam from blogs all the time?