What happens if you remove your blog spam filters completely for one day? By turning off Akismet, can you manage the huge spam that flows in? Participate in the Spam Filter Free Day and recognize how anti-spam tools are indispensable for the modern blogger.
Can you really turn off Akismet?
I get over 2000 spam comments everyday! Akismet a wonderful anti-spam tool that does a great job of blocking spam on our site. Of couse sometimes Akimset blocks our valid comments too, but you can request them to fix that. It is surprising how much spam inflicts the blogosphere. Some bloggers even use Spam Karma 2 + Akismet + Bad Behaviour 2 to despam WordPress. It is essential for me to to keep deleting thousands of Akismet blocked spam to keep database backups running and also before wordpress upgrades to reduce database size. In fact, weeding not-spam comments from the Akismet queue is a top blogger time wasting habit.
Jesper is removing all spam protection from his blog on December 15 to highlight how much energy, computer power, network traffic, and manual work is wasted by spam comments and put focus on the effectiveness of spam filters like Akismet. He calls it Spam Filter Free Day. Reading his article was illuminating about the multiple spam filters and related services we will need to disable like the secret server-validation (before the comments hits wordpress), disable plugin that emails subscribers for new comment, disable Akismet, disable blacklist that holds comments for moderation, disable the function that holds comment the links, disable any plugin that makes spammers gain like a do follow links.
Stop and Block Spam
The spam menace can be appreciated by checking the Live Spam Zeitgeist
3,667,208,575 spams caught so far
7,202,009 so far today
92% of all comments are spam
Amazing!
Don’t be scared to participate. At the end of the day, I am sure you will get thousands of spam comments to moderate, but Akismet makes it easy and fast by simply rechecking the queue and automatically mark all spam comments.
Are you letting spam in for one day? How much time will it take to delete the spam on just that day? And how much time does Akismet therefore save you? Akismet guys want to know.
Update: Lessons learnt from Spam Filter Free Day.