Akismet - Tevine

Spam should be considered a statistic

You hate spam. Everyone hates spam. Spammers would hope that you mistakenly approve their spam, but that never really happens, if at all. As spam volumes continue to rise, people can easily brush it off as a regular thing. Nonetheless, let’s turn that nasty piece of garbage to a piece of “bragging right”. The idea is this: The more popular your site is, the more spam you’ll get.

Why this theory is true

Generally, comment spammers tend to target certain sites more than others. So, well-linked sites (and sites easily found by others through god-knows-what) tend to receive more attention by spammers. As far as anyone can tell, it does seem that spam bots are really efficient - being able to find well-concealed sites, and hitting them where you least expect them.

The good news - because spam is so common, you need not worry about getting rid of them, because that’s taken care of by Akismet. (So dear spammers, your advertisements will never see the light, ever.) What’s next? Show off your Akismet counter. Once thought of as a spam deterrent that has apparently failed, the Akismet counter can be now considered a bragging tool - despite the prominance of spam, it still takes real effort to rake up over 1000 spam comments detected and destroyed by Akismet. Want to make your friends go “wow” in an ackward manner? Show them you have gotten Akismet to trash over 10,000 spam comments.

The What IFs

People might say that others might attempt to inflate their spam count by simply… spamming their own blogs. That, I have to say, is utterly dumbfolding, because why on Earth would they want to do that? Secondly, if you were to spam on your own blog, you risk having your comments detected as spam on other blogs. The spam count will never be inflated, because people often look down on something as “trival” as the Akismet counter.

What if you do really want to use the spam counter as a statistic? The thing is, as with any website popularity measurement, there are its flaws. The spam counter is so looked down upon, that no one will ever use it, if ever. Do not hope in the near future that Akismet might do something like Alexa does with traffic - give a special website ranking called “spam rank”, which should ideally have popular sites at the top of that ladder (since they get spammed often).