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Blog comment spam statistics: An insight

Statistics showing how much comment spam my blog has received since December 2007.

Anyone who runs a blog would be familiar with spam, those unsolicited comments and trackbacks sent by scammers to try and lure people to click on unsavoury links.

I get a lot of them submitted to my Grapevine blog, and I thought I’d examine the data produced by my spam filter software Akismet to see how many I get every month.

The following is a graph that displays the number of submitted spam comments per month since December 2007. As can be seen, the amount of comment spam has risen substantially.

spam-comments

The greatest amount of comment spam was submitted in July 2011 when the Grapevine received 12,409 submissions. That’s 400 submissions a day or one every four minutes.

Last month the Grapevine received 6,981 submissions.

This is a tremendous waste of bandwidth, but an unfortunate reality of running a blog in 2013. Even back in 2004, I wrote of the problems of email spam. If there were a way to stop this wasteful consumption of resources, it’d be terrific but no solution seems imminent. In the interim, we have to rely on tools like Akismet.

   

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