Akismet is a powerful wordpress plugin that blocks spam comments and today Akismet clocked 1 million spam comments on this blog. Actively and efficiently stopping spam in the background, Akismet has been our trusted anti-spam tool for over 2 years!
I rate it one of the most essential WordPress plugins ever and definitely a part of the 50 best wordpress plugins. Akismet is a great tool, but paid comments are still difficult to detect as they seem so genuine, though you can always recheck the queue. In fact people have tried to test what happens if you turn off Akismet for a day. Akismet had blacklisted us once such that all our comments on other blogs ended in the spam queue, but if Akismet is playing naughty and blocking your valid comments, their tech staff can fix it for you.
Though Bad Behaviour and Spam Karma have been long time competitors, but new powerful competitors like Typepad Antispam and Defensio have emerged which claim more accuracy and better spam protection, but as Akismet comes bundled with every wordpress install and is tightly integrated with wordpress, it has wide usage and popularity. Its so well integrated, you can use it with bbpress forums too.
Check the Live Spam Zeitgeist to see how spam is overwhelming the blogosphere – 6,712,842,940 spams caught so far, 4,342,025 so far today, 88% of all comments are spam… you just cannot blog without a spam comment blocker.
Webmaster tip: Its easy to reduce your database size by deleting all blocked spam comments and it will also make your database backups smaller, easier to download, and ensure email backups don’t disappear for size constraints.
PS – I was waiting to catch the millionth spam comment for the last few days and keeping track of the counter. But spam comments come in so fast that its impossible to snap a screenshot in time…