Comment - [kom-ent] -noun
a remark, observation, or criticism

Practically every website you visit these days offers you the option to leave a comment on their news story, or article, or well pretty much anything. This has the great benefit of opening the doors of communication between your readers, or clients as the case may be, and your company.

Comments allow a rich dialogue to occur and can help to improve the content on your own site; give you feedback as to better practices; and present your company as one that is willing to engage in discussion and that has a real human touch.

Enter Spam

Unfortunately, where-ever there is an opportunity for spammers to lurk, you know that they’ll definitely take advantage of what is clearly a personal invitation issued by you on a silver plate with a little chocolate placed on top.

Spam is the bane of the web, with email in-boxes constantly under attack and web forums being harassed by fake posts from spam bots. In 2006, 40% of all email was considered to be spam, with 12.4 billion spam emails sent daily!

Comments on web pages are no exception, with websites being forced to apply all manner of schemes and methods to prevent spam. These range from moderating every comment, to asking users to register before leaving a comment (therefore validating an actual human with a real email address), to requiring the visitor to interpret a garbled mess of numbers and letters known as a captcha.

All of these methods work, but waste time for someone along the way. Fortunately there is an answer, and that answer lies with Automattic.

Akismet from Automattic

Akismet is just about the best unobtrusive spam blocking tool that I’ve ever come across. It works across a range of systems thanks to their well constructed API’s, and comes pre-loaded on our favourite CMS, Word Press.

Once you have it installed and running (requiring only an API key), it goes to work and blocks pretty much every spam comment that is harassing your website. It’s as close to perfect as you can get. Out of habit I always check to see if there are any real comments that have gotten accidentally marked as spam, and not once has that happened.

Since we set up the new Pixelapes website we’ve had 73 real comments left by passers-by. We’ve also had a grand total of 2,250 spam comments, all categorically blocked by Akismet. That’s 96.8% of the comments left on this website are spam comments.

Having a look at the Akismet website you can get a quick idea of how pandemic spam is across the web. So far Akismet has stopped 3,645,529,685 spam comments - yes that’s 3.6 billion - with another 13 million spam comments stopped today.

When will they stop?

Obviously the creators of spam really live by the maxim that if you throw enough shit, some of it will stick. It makes a mockery of Bill Gates’ famous quote in 2004:
Two years from now, spam will be solved.

However, as apparent as it is that the spam problem is not going away, there is some hope. With tools like this, and the ever improving email spam filters that are appearing (I know Gmail have really gotten a very good handle on spam).

We’ve been attacked by spam bots in the past - one day we had something like 50,000 spam mails in our mail queue. It caused no end of problems, but we overcame it, real mails filtered through, and we put more stringent controls in place. We’ve been rock solid since then and our websites remain spam comment free!

We can but hope that some day the spam blocking tools will become so good that the spammers will just give up, but I think that’s wishful thinking, and we’ll just continue to deal with it.