February was another slow spam month for Akismet. We didn’t even hit 200 million comments on any day this month. You can see the daily breakdown of the spam and ham comments Akismet caught in the graph below:
The total number of spam messages caught this month was 4,090,182,500. To visualize this, let’s say each spam is represented by one blade of grass in a football field — to commemorate the football season ending this February.
How many football fields would it take to cover that much spam? Twelve and a half.
How about the real comments? We got a total of 131,465,000 of those this month. And if each one were represented by a blade of grass, they would take just under one half of a football field to account for. As always, real comments account for much much less than spam comments — about 3% this month.
This month was unusually low in spam numbers not only compared with last month (with a 14% decrease in volume), but also since last year — decreasing by 38% compared with February 2014.
We missed only about 1 in every 10,917 spam comments this month — not bad!
Your own blog’s stats may have followed a similar pattern of decreased spam activity this month. If you are ever finding that the spammers are winning and more comments than usual are getting through Akismet’s filters, please feel free to reach out and let us know. We’re happy to look into it and help restore order 🙂
This post is part of a monthly series summarizing some stats and figures from the Akismet universe. Feel free to browse all of the posts in the series.
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