New milestone reached: 20k spam comments

Since July last year (10 months) this blog has received over 20,000 spam comments. It's an interesting statistic but fairly meaningless. Far more important is what happened to them all.

From those 20,000 spam comments I've only actually seen 2. A simple combination of Akismet and the blogg.de blacklist have caught all the rest. That's a 99.99% success rate. For the 1-2 minutes of work it took to install and configure the spam protector plugin for serendipity I find that really very impressive.

Although these tools prevent spam creating a visible impact it still remains a problem. So many spam comments are going to use up a fair amount of bandwidth. Also, things are only getting worse. On average I've received 2,000 spam comments a month but I've received 1,000 in the past week alone. The pace is increasing.

I've discussed Bad Behaviour before but I've never felt that I personally need it. I think it is getting towards the point where I need to take another look.