WordPress just hit an impressive milestone today: it has now filtered its 50 billionth piece of spam. Akismet, the homegrown comment filtering system from WordPress maker Automattic is the tool responsible for all the spam fighting. And those spammers keep the system busy. In April, Akismet blocked 1.8 billion spam messages, or 60 million pieces of spam per day, 2.5 million per hour, or 700 per second.
Whoa, that’s a lot of spam.
Akismet, those with long memories will recall, was the first product Automattic ever launched, arriving on October 25th, 2005 – a month before WordPress.com. WordPress sites now attract over 600 million unique visitors each month, according to Quantcast, and WordPress powers 1 in 2 blogs today (including yours truly). 50,000 to 100,000 new blogs launch on WordPress daily, giving spammers a seemingly never-ending network to target.
The Akismet filter works by combining information about the spam it captures on all participating blogs, then uses that info to define rules to block future spam. The system is now included by default in WordPress builds (since version 2.0) and in all the hosted WordPress.com blogs. There’s also an API for use outside of WordPress.
According to stats from the company, 92% of all comments checked by Akismet are spam. (Also, whoa!) Last month, the anti-spam system was used by 12 million sites, with an accuracy rate of 99.9%, Automattic claims. Which kind of makes it all the more impressive when you see a spam comment get through, when you stop and think about it.
Akismet’s last big milestone occurred in April of last year, when it filtered its 25 billionth piece of spam. At the time, it was detecting spam at a rate of 40 million comments per day. (As noted above, it’s now up to 60 million).
Automattic is the company behind WordPress.com, the simplest, most secure way to start web-publishing immediately on the open source WordPress platform. They also make Jetpack for WordPress, which bundles a number of social improvements to the WordPress core software as a single plugin. Automattic offers a number of products, like VaultPress and Akismet, on a freemium model so anyone can use them for free, and later have the choice to pay extra for premium features. Automattic has over 150 employees, including...
Akismet is an comment and forum spam protection service for WordPress and other platforms. It uses plugins or a simple API and checks spam in real-time on its own servers.
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