There has been a ton of buzz around the blogosphere about the huge spikes in spam the past few weeks, and we’ve been blogging about it a fair amount too, but I was getting tired of blogging the doubling every few days. 😉
Now we have a pretty neat Akismet stats page which graphs out the number of spams and legitimate comments (aka ham) that we see each day. Check it out and be glad you’re not having to deal with all that by hand any more.
Akismet 
Thanks for creating that Zeitgeist. It’s good to know that I’m not the only one getting bombarded.
Wow. Nice stat. Was wondering how come no post on spam here ;). BTW, thanks to Akismet, … it blocked around 1500 spams for me in the last week!. Cheers!
I just activated the Akismet plugin two days ago and have received 150+ spam comments since then. I never kept track of how many were coming in, and now that i see how much spam i get in such a small amount of time i’m blown away. Thanks Akismet!
It’s typical for the Zeitgeist to say there have been 37 million total spam messages caught, and over a million today.
What does that tell you? There’s a massive spike. I shut down all comments on my blog. I got nealy 7000 in the last week (all blocked, except two), and just don’t want the bandwidth issues.
C’est la guerre.
Um, what about an XML file? With all the stats stuff too?
Total spam, Total ham, Spam today, and Ham today.
Because then you could use the XML file like the Firefox download count XML file. Please? Thanks…
The chart is actually powered by XML, you can see it here:
https://akismet.com/stats/chart-data.php
Yay phpswf charts. It’s “teh win” php/swf charting package. I paid my $40 for it too.
Eww.. xml passed as text/html? I thought you would have known better! ;-).
Anyway… very cool stats.
Sadly some spam has been getting by the past few days… rather annoying. Hopefully you guys have some fixes coming up.
Hi guys,
I think a better way to display this information is (# of spam)/(# of Akismet users); the current graph displays both the growth in spam AND the growth in Akismet’s popularity. Of course, it probably looks much more impressive as it is now 😉
Cheers,
Bart
This totally ROCK!. Thanks for taking the time to fill the need guys. I had heard about comment spamming but man was a pissed when I found 200 comments for (all the regular crap) on posts for “swim school” and “baby pictures”. Spamming has got to stop.
Again thanks.
What does it shows?
Growth i SPAM or growth i aksimet users? Probably a combination of both.
Gunnar, the growth of users hasn’t nearly paced the growth of spam, as you can see by the “ham” numbers.
Thanks Matt. One problem though, when I load the page you gave it comes up blank. No source, and nothing in the browser. What happened? Thanks…
Joe, sorry we had some server probs and the stats page was messed up for about 30 minutes. It should be working now.
Great feature! Can I just ask a stupid question: what’s ham? :-S
Oh… That’s for the graph you have on the site, would I have to do a chart to make it work? Is there a version with just the stats today’s spam, total spam / ham, etc? Thanks… At least it works again. 🙂
Ham is regular comments.
I can personally vouch for the huge increase in spam in the past few weeks. It’s insane. But I, being a sucker for nice graphs, would also like to see an “average spams/hams per akismet user” graph 🙂