71 Comments

  • Dave March 22, 2007 @ 8:00 am

    Is there a running number of how many have been caught so far? I know the 500 or so from my blog doesn’t amount to a hill of beans! Still, I’ve been extremely happy with the effectiveness of Askimet.

  • Sly March 22, 2007 @ 8:06 am

    Well I don’t know, but with all the spam I’m getting lately I think that that moment isn’t far away.

  • CT March 22, 2007 @ 8:10 am

    Whenever it does, you need to have Mike Meyers on standby, in his Dr. Evil gear, ready to declare: “One BILL-E-ON spams!”

  • nanunanu March 22, 2007 @ 8:15 am

    I think Akismet will hit 1,000,000,000 spam in 2009 sometime. But that’s a projected growth. If more people created wordpress blogs and activated the akismet then it will jump but I don’t see that happening. So sometime in 2009, akismet will hit it’s 1 billionth spam block.

  • nanunanu March 22, 2007 @ 8:18 am

    I retract my phrase after futher inspection, the total at aksimet is “Total spam: 984,726,157″. So I am going tomorrow, the 1 billionth spam will come.

  • Chris March 22, 2007 @ 8:18 am

    Next week on my blog alone…. ;-)

    Can you come up with something similar to stop that poxy Elliot Back plugin being used to steal my posts? I’m getting really sick of seeing them appear all over the web…

    That’d be a plugin I’d pay for!

  • brokenshardz March 22, 2007 @ 8:19 am

    I say that it will be within 2 days, seeing the trend at which spam is increasing each day.

  • stephen o'grady March 22, 2007 @ 8:21 am

    couldn’t say, but we’re doing our part ;)

  • Dan Atkinson March 22, 2007 @ 8:25 am

    We should hit this awful awful milestone within the next 18 hours. That’s my bet.

    About 09:00 UTC (Friday 23) if you want an exact time!

  • Yazeed March 22, 2007 @ 8:29 am

    Saturday! early morning

  • Titanas March 22, 2007 @ 8:38 am

    I wish Akismet will NEVER hit 1bn spams, meaning that spam message will die die die in the next 3-5 years.

  • Bill March 22, 2007 @ 8:44 am

    Noon CST tomorrow (3/23)

  • Ike March 22, 2007 @ 9:19 am

    Saturday morning, 7:05am, Zulu time.

  • Steve March 22, 2007 @ 9:29 am

    Unfortunately very very soon.
    We only started our blog last week so we haven’t yet got a large visitor base, but the number of spam emails we get are unbelievable.
    Steve

  • Matt Ellsworth March 22, 2007 @ 9:38 am

    I’m not sure – but I bet at the rate that my blogs seem to get spam – some of them at about 200 per day – even with askimet enabled and user registration required. But Askimet blocks 99.99% of it – so its all good… thanks to that handy delete all button

  • diffuze March 22, 2007 @ 9:46 am

    It’s blocked 5800 spam so far on my blog since early may last year.

    I’m guessing that we’ll hit 1 Billion within a few days. :)

  • Patrick Havens March 22, 2007 @ 9:50 am

    Well tax day would be appropriate.

  • Liam March 22, 2007 @ 10:10 am

    Doubt it’ll be much longer, I mean I ended up with 80 being caught within the first hour of my first post on my blog.

    I wish that there was something more we could do to block them – even though askimet is very good, it’d be nice to eliminate it before even them.

  • John Lloyd March 22, 2007 @ 12:11 pm

    I’m not sure when it’ll hit 10^9, but I am sure that I appreciate the 1000s from which Akismet has protected my blogs.

  • Pierro March 22, 2007 @ 12:13 pm

    more than 100 cought on my blog today!

  • Matteo March 22, 2007 @ 12:44 pm

    WOW, great Akismet!!!!!!!!

    But the SPAM is too much…

  • Pi March 22, 2007 @ 12:52 pm

    As at the time of writing Akismet has blocked 13,315 spams, many of which I have never seen since I also employ a close comments plug in.

    I’d go for within the next 24 hours.

  • Niko Neugebauer March 22, 2007 @ 2:08 pm

    Saturday at 00:00 or 00:01 =O)

  • David March 22, 2007 @ 2:48 pm

    Akismet nailed 13.000+ on my site so far.
    Worst day: today 800+
    Thank giant spaghettimonster we have akismet

  • Matt March 22, 2007 @ 3:09 pm

    Hmm, tomorrow should be the mark of 1 billion SPAM messages. :P

  • Camilo Alvarez March 22, 2007 @ 3:19 pm

    Its wierd, i never recieve one spam comment, i dont have any protection (akismet, captchas, etc). Maybe my page its so impopular, even for the spambots :)

  • Lucas McDonnell March 22, 2007 @ 5:14 pm

    I was getting around 100+ spam per day — after installing Bad Behaviour, I have literally had 1 spam in a week. This is seriously the best plugin I’ve ever installed for blocking spam — and no, unfortunately I didn’t create it. :D

  • David March 22, 2007 @ 5:20 pm

    In exactly 26 hours 32 minutes from the timestamp on this comment.

  • kates March 22, 2007 @ 5:31 pm

    Whoever predict when that billionth spam arrive will spam free for a month.

  • Jesper Rønn-Jensen March 22, 2007 @ 5:34 pm

    My guess is in exactly 14 hours from now.

    45 days ago we passed 100,000 blocked spam comments on our blog. Since then, Akismet has blocked 50,000 spam comments on our blog.

    Unfortunately, Akismet is not completely effective, so on an average day, 3-10 comments actually slip through.

  • Mike March 22, 2007 @ 5:43 pm

    March 23, 2007, at about 1400 CST (U.S.A). The current count is about 988,750,000, with over 11,500,000 caught today.

    Without Askimet, I’d have to turn off blog comments – and that’s no fun!

  • J. Pisano March 22, 2007 @ 5:49 pm

    Wow, what a simple post with a great question that provokes so much thought and commentary.

    Really, based on the 1, SPAMS a got TODAY, it can’t be long at all!

    Joe Pisano MUSicTECHnology.net
    http://www.mustech.net

  • J. Pisano March 22, 2007 @ 5:49 pm

    Should read 1000 spams! :)

  • Elron Steele March 22, 2007 @ 6:05 pm

    “Akismet has caught 50,499 spam for you since you first installed it.”

    Thats since July 2006 roughly, for a blog that gets a couple hundred visitors a day. I expect that globally, its gotta be close to 1 billion now.

  • Avinash March 22, 2007 @ 7:43 pm

    One Billion Spams!? Holy cow! Now a days, I see people talking about huge spam counts.. TechCrunch hit 1 million(?) a few days ago.

    Thank God, Akismet is there to protect us! Otherwise I’d really feel pissed off only in 4999 spam comments (February 2007 to present) on my blog.

  • Rusty Ranchero March 22, 2007 @ 9:07 pm

    Last week! Doese Akismet stop forum spam bots too? We could surely use that as well.

  • Mr.Byte March 22, 2007 @ 11:47 pm

    The 1 billionth spam gonna coincide with the shut down day. As everybody shuts down their comp for a day, the bots gonna be busy spamming

  • Andre March 23, 2007 @ 1:41 am

    It would take 24 hours to hit it. There appears to be a drastic increase in SPAM over the past week. Why I am not certain but Akismet is hitting about 4-500 a day for the last week off my blog. That is far higher than any other week that I recall.

  • Andy March 23, 2007 @ 5:47 am

    I installed a shoutbox on my blog yesterday and within the hour was being hit by drug spam in it, so I had to make it usable by registered site members only. So I’d say, yeah, very soon I would expect that significant mark to be reached… Man, how much crap is that? How much slave labour went into compiling all those spams?

  • Max March 23, 2007 @ 5:55 am

    On 26th of March. You all owe me a beer ;)

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  • Jason Hoffman March 23, 2007 @ 12:33 pm

    That’s awesome Matt. Well done.

  • Peter March 23, 2007 @ 7:23 pm

    Spam grows exponentially. I have a lightly-traffic’d blog, and got over 2000 spams this week alone. It took me something like the first three months to get the first 2000.

    So, a better question would be, when do you expect Akismet to reach 1,000,000,000,000 blocked spams? (1 Trillion in North American terms)

  • Jonathan March 23, 2007 @ 8:08 pm

    It’s almost there!!!!

  • Matt March 24, 2007 @ 2:34 am

    It just passed a few minutes ago!

  • Viper007Bond March 24, 2007 @ 6:04 am

    Holy crap…

  • Maureen Francis March 24, 2007 @ 10:50 am

    Now the question is when will it register 2 billion?

  • Avinash March 24, 2007 @ 2:19 pm

    I’m shocked to see the speed! :| And the funniest thing is that even spammers are creative! Sometimes, I check my spam messages and feel like laughing.

  • Ike March 24, 2007 @ 2:27 pm

    Hey Matt… what do I win?

  • Mike March 24, 2007 @ 3:21 pm

    One billion, wow — you are making the internet a better place for everyone to enjoy, thanks Matt.

  • Matt March 24, 2007 @ 11:34 pm

    Wow, did you ever think you’d see the day, when 1 Billion SPAMs were caught, while it was being developed?

    What you should do is have an actual live counter, that would increase without the need for refreshes. :P

  • Jan Stedehouder March 25, 2007 @ 9:19 am

    With 5.000 spamposts being caught by Akismet in the last week (15.000 since I started the weblog last fall) I can’t even start to say how much I appreciate this tools. It wouldn’t have been possible to run a weblog at all without it.

    Thanks. Keep on snatching them ;-)

  • TW March 25, 2007 @ 5:41 pm

    I am in a similar boat to Jan. I have a low traffic site (maybe 300 visitors a day at best) but get nearly 2000 spam posts (trackbacks, pings and comments) a week. Without Akismet, I have no idea what I would do. (Sadly around 2-3 a week sneak past the filters but I can live with that!)

    Well done Akismet!

    (as for the 95% of all comments being spam, it is probably higher on my blog… :-( )

  • Steven Roddis March 26, 2007 @ 1:27 am

    1,016,448,365

    (16,425 in the last two months on my blog)

  • Carl T March 26, 2007 @ 3:31 pm

    It seems to be 100% effective so far. None through and no false positives but I am not a big site (yet). It will clearly reach X00,000,000,000…. It will just take time. The only thing that will stop that number is if spam somehow vanishes over night. I wish Akismet luck but if spam goes I won;t feel sorry for Akismet.

  • Alison Moore Smith March 26, 2007 @ 4:46 pm

    I have never left spam in my life, but about three weeks ago akismet got me banned from all the WP blogs I post on. I contacted them and was told “it is self-correcting” and “should be adapting soon.” Great, after three weeks.

    So…I think they’ll hit it any second because they’re calling a heck of a lot of stuff spam, that isn’t.

  • Matt March 27, 2007 @ 9:42 am

    Alison, the fact that your comment got through here with no problems means that the system was, indeed, self-correcting. You weren’t caught by Akismet.

    I can’t speak to your problems on other sites, so maybe there is something else in play that is causing your comments not to appear.

  • Nicholas Lee March 28, 2007 @ 1:37 am

    Would be interesting to see a line on there for the number of actual blogs protected. Could see if there was a relative increase in the amount per blog of spam.

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