On January 4 we reported that the Akismet filter had stopped a million spam comments from reaching TechCrunch. At that point we’d been using it for about nine months.
The number of blocked spam comments is now two million, just ten weeks later. That works out to about 15,000 spam comments hitting TechCrunch every day.
If we did not have Akismet, we couldn’t allow anonymous commenting here on TechCrunch. We used to go through all spam comments to pick out the occasional false positive and accept it. Now, there are just too many to go through. All comments marked by Akismet as spam get deleted almost immediately.
We’ve now implemented a WordPress-recommended custom plugin that turns comments off on posts that are more than two weeks old. This will significantly reduce the overall amount of spam that hits the blog, so I don’t expect to see this total spam number continue to increase exponentially.