Akismet had another record‑breaking month in October. While in September we hit and surpassed the 300‑million spam messages per day milestone, in October we saw over 400 million spam messages come through per day on 12 different days.
Here are the daily stats:
There was a rise of 44% in the number of spam comments caught from last month, and a 185% rise from last year in October.
In total, Akismet caught 11,337,365,500 spam messages this month, and 207,939,000 ham messages. As usual, the amount of legitimate messages going around is much less than spam – coming in at 1.8% this month.
To help visualize the numbers, picture a trip from the Earth to the sun. It is 150 million kilometres long on average (that’s approximately 93 million miles). If each kilometre represents one spam comment, it would take 75 trips to the sun to account for all the spam comments Akismet saw this month. On the other hand, if each legitimate comment were one kilometre, it would make up only one trip and a third.
The busiest day for spam for Akismet this month was the 29th, with over 482 million spam comments caught. The slowest day was the 12th (coming in at only 273 million).
Akismet missed only about 1 in every 11,475 spam comments this month. Your own blog’s spam comments may have followed similar rises and falls, and seen some missed spam comments. Please mark those missed comments as spam so that Akismet can learn from your feedback. If you notice a large number of spam comments coming through uncaught by Akismet, please contact us and we’ll be glad to help.
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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