Jesper Rønn-Jensen is planning to remove all spam protection from his blog on December 15. It’s easy to forget just how much anti-spam solutions help bloggers. It’s not just Akismet — there are many other methods from CAPTCHA to Spam Karma.
It was not so long ago that a blogger could wake to find a couple of hundred (or more) spam comments that arrived overnight. Deleting them not only took time but it also took some of the fun away from blogging.
So to remove all protection — and to announce it ahead of time — is interesting. Will you join in? How much time will it take to delete the spam on just that day? And how much time does Akismet therefore save you? If you participate, let us know!
Akismet 
Thanks for mentioning. And please do spread the word. Actually to be correct, we are two people writing the Justaddwater.dk blog. Don’t forget to mention Thomas Watson as well 🙂
/Jesper
I don’t get that much spam per day, but I still don’t think I’d voluntarily remove spam protection. That seems a bit like having unprotected sex to illustrate how much better protected sex is.
Hehe… it risk my blog life on Google. I guess that guy still use nofollow tag that’s why he get that nerve.
I do not need convincing, I already believe you. I am not turning the protection off for a minute. I have got lots of other things to do, I do not have the time to sit and delete spam.
I’d say, that’s suicide…
Not a chance, I was burned a long time ago, until I found Spam Karma and Akismet. It took me over two days to clean up the spam from my comments on one blog, that had come in over night. I have better things to do than clean up garbage from mindless drones. Thanks to Akismet, I can do my work and enjoy checking my blog.
I will not join in. I like the experiment, but I don’t like the time it will take me to delete all the spam.
well, after having circa 520 possible (ok, real but Akismet leaved to me decide that) spam comments in 36 hours I don’t even think so 😀
so thanks, but NO THANKS !
SOunds like a thanksgiving day for Spam 🙂
Well if they succeed to spread the event, thanks to them, spammers will be working even harder that day. Hooray.
Seems like these people have too much time on their hands if they are willing to leave their blogs open to spam attacks, but hey, rather them than me!
Personally, Akismet has been a saviour for me and I’m sure thousands of others.
Keep up the fantastic works guys! 🙂
Absolutely not. I have had so much referral spam that I’ve taken to backing up akismet with the Apache “Limit GET” directive. Together they work really well, and I’m not touching them.
Interesting. Not sure if I have the will power to disable spam protection for a day. All it takes is 24 hours until at least 100 spam comments are on the blog.
It is not dangerous?
Hell no, I’m not participating. I like blocking all of that spam so that I don’t have to spend as much time dealing with it or bothering my readers!
A very interesting idea – and a good one, it will remind users and visitors of the great pluging that is Akismet!
I don’t need to allow spam through for a day to know that Akismet saves me a whole swag of time every single day. I’ve written about my love affair with Akismet many times before, such a fantastic service!
I am sorry but I am too much of a wimp to do that. Just thinking about the flood of spam scares me.
That is indeed an interesting idea. It’s kind of like just standing there and letting yourself get slapped. If anything it might serve as a reminder. Reminds me of also how Christians wear crosses around their neck.
I hated those days and I too remember spending at least an hour a day cleaning up spam. The concept of blog spam (we all accepted email spam) was simply bizarre. But unfortunately, I don’t think I’ll participate. I bid the rest of everyone who does – good luck.
I’m in! Let’s do it!
What about turning off comment moderation, and “Before a comment appears” too? Surely that would make thing a little more interesting 🙂
Akismet / other spam controls are handy, but I don’t exactly generate a lot of spam / blog traffic, so I would estimate, maybe 1-2 minutes on the 16th cleaning up the spam
If I remove it, I’d get swamped immediately!
No, I will not be removing the spam protection software from my blog.
It is an interesting experiment though and I will watch for the results of this experiment.
Gene
If it weren’t for the effectiveness of Akismet, I definitely wouldn’t be blogging anymore. I wouldn’t entertain the thought of turning it off for even just an hour. I’m trying to think of a good analogy–performing in a honky tonk bar without chickenwire across the front of the stage? Something like that.
Sounds like a great idea. I guess I’ll also be disabling all my installed anti-spam plugins on that day, and post on my blog the next day how Akismet helps me!
That guy is nuts. you could not pay me to remove my spam protection.
I used to run a forum to catalog my writing before then the spam bots found me. Then it was not fun to run the forum anymore so I trash canned it and started a blog.
By the way, is there a way to let Akismet traverse comments back in time to see if it can find any spam once we turn it back on? We really could need that to save time 🙂
I’ve done this in the past. Disabled Akismet for an hour or two. What is very odd, and it has to be a bug, is that when I re-enable it the Akismet moderated comments will still have dozens of spams in it, even though no spam comments would have been showing in the mod queue…
db
Hell no I won’t join in. I want a life! lol
I prefer to stay safe myself. Akismet is too valuable of a tool NOT to leave on – and for someone who doesn’t have the time to remove spam and monitor his site … yeah, not happening. I wish Akismet was a pre-installed plug with WordPress!
Am I the only one that thinks that’s a pretty stupid idea??
That’s like disabling your car alarm, and putting up TV ads in advance letting the theives know where its parked and when the alarm will be disabled.
It’s like turning off your fire drills and removing all fire extinguishers for a day just to see how important you are.
Not a smart idea
“how important
youthey are.”Sorry about that.
im in with my linux blog 🙂 i just hope i wont catch too much spam hehe
Wow, that sounds like fun 😉
I’m going to do it. Lol.
Eric Novak
My site has been totally garbaged with spam earlier, akismet took care of it all. I accepted your challenge to try without akismet and have been completely naked for 24 hrs now. Not one single spam-comment…
I’ve been loosing readers i guess.
I can not even begin imagining how my day would go if I disabled Akismet protection. You have a nice way to scare us with your ideas!
I would have to hire a team of monkeys to delete all the spam I would get if I turned Akismet off. I wouldn’t mind paying them but I would have to put them up in my apartment and I think the smell would be prohibitive. Monkeys can be very dirty creatures.
I’m happy with my spam protection 🙂 I’m not turning it off.
Considering that Akismet has prevented (as of this minute) 77,163 spam comments on my main blog, no, I do not plan on disabling it!
I started another blog a few weeks ago. After updating the DNS for the newly registered domain name, installing WordPress on a new hosting account, and publishing my first “Hello, World!” entry, I received a spam comment within four hours of publication!! Dang, those suckers are fast!
No way I’m gonna let my guard off. Akismet has help my blog a lot and I intend to let them do just that. Thanks for that. No Spammer day for me.. I’m not that crazy yet. LOL.
Sure… Let me disable ALLOW COMMENTS first then Okay Why not? ahaha
Good Luck