Spam, spam, spam..

I thought I had a spam problem on the MMISoftware blog, but over at techcrunch they are in a different league!!

At MMISoftware the blog got hit by a serious amount of spam last year. I don’t know why, but at the tail end of 2006 our spam rate went through the roof. (See earlier posts 1, and 2 for more on spam.) As a result I took the blog down for a few days, cleared out the database (a surprising number had slipped through manual checking), updated Wordpress and installed the Akismet blog spam filter.

At MMISoftware blog we have caught around 8,200 blog spam messages since installing the Akismet blog spam filter on the 10th January 2007. That works out at about 120 per day (actually it started off at around only 10 or 20 per day, but has been increasing, I had around 400 the other day)…. I thought this was a problem, then I read the post over at techcrunch.

In a recent post at techcrunch (read their post) they have said they get around 15,000 spam comments per day! 15,000!!! Wow! They have caught over 2,000,000 since they installed a spam filter (they seem to be using Akismet and a plugin that closes comments on blog posts after 2 weeks). What is interesting is they also report seeing a massive increase in spam just after Christmas.

Spam, spam, spam… the curse of the information age!

Update, 22 Mar 2007 22:12:03: Since posting the above the blog has been hit by 1,800 spam messages in 5 days, that is 360 per day, and increasing… what is going on?