{"id":237,"date":"2007-07-06T09:05:25","date_gmt":"2007-07-06T08:05:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/west-penwith.org.uk\/blog\/archives\/237"},"modified":"2014-04-17T10:59:35","modified_gmt":"2014-04-17T09:59:35","slug":"akismet-spam-statistics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/west-penwith.org.uk\/blog\/archives\/237","title":{"rendered":"Akismet Spam Statistics"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>As my &#8220;caught spam&#8221; counter rapidly approaches the 100,000 milestone I have noticed that there seems to be a discrepancy. Currently I get between 200 and 300 spam comments a day on this blog. This high figure really kicked in over Christmas last year but I have been using the <a href=\"http:\/\/akismet.com\/\">Akismet anti-spam plugin<\/a> since the previous May when the problem was <a href=\"http:\/\/west-penwith.org.uk\/blog\/archives\/72\">significant, but a lot less<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>The <a href=\"http:\/\/akismet.com\/faq\/\">way Akisment works<\/a> is that, as each comment arrives, details of it are checked against a central database at Automattic and an opinion is given as to whether it is spam or not. If it thinks it is spam it is put in a separate bucket and doesn&#8217;t get displayed; if not it goes for moderation as normal (I am a bit more paranoid than some and every time I consider taking off the moderation, I get a flurry of misses). The spam comments are kept for 15 days unless deleted manually and I have an opportunity to override the decision, though I haven&#8217;t seen a single false positive yet.<\/p>\n<p>So every comment that arrives is given a unique number in the blog database, there doesn&#8217;t seem to be any way of bypassing that as they are all kept for a period and need to be referenced. As I write the latest spam message has been given number 62,407. This is 150 a day since I started, which seems reasonable. So how do Akismet reckon that they have stopped 99,315 on my behalf, almost 100 a day more?<\/p>\n<p>The faq says<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Some versions of the Akismet for WordPress plugin will hide duplicate comments, making it appear to be a different number caught than displayed.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>but I can see no evidence of that and I am using the standard issued plugin.<\/p>\n<p>It is not particularly important as there is no doubt that it does a good job,  but it would suggest that their web site claim of nearly 2 billion spam blocked is also inflated.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As my &#8220;caught spam&#8221; counter rapidly approaches the 100,000 milestone I have noticed that there seems to be a discrepancy. Currently I get between 200 and 300 spam comments a day on this blog. This high figure really kicked in over Christmas last year but I have been using the Akismet anti-spam plugin since the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":239,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-237","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technical","category-wordpress"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/west-penwith.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/west-penwith.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/west-penwith.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/west-penwith.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/239"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/west-penwith.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=237"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/west-penwith.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1973,"href":"https:\/\/west-penwith.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237\/revisions\/1973"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/west-penwith.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=237"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/west-penwith.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=237"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/west-penwith.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=237"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}