OK – here’s an idea to throw out to the masses, and something I reckon could take off quite nicely as a widget or whatever.
Could somebody please write a Spam analyzer (‘spamalyzer’/'spamalytics’ etc).
I think a little league table of hot spam topics might be a cool little tool. It should be easy enough to write something to trawl through the comments in your akismet queue and do some kind of keyword frequency breakdown.
You could extend it to geo-breakdown the originating IP to see what kind of spam comes from where, and produce daily/weekly charts of hot spam keywords, or perhaps analyse the originating email addresses and names. There’s a heap of variations out there - you might need to censor some of the keywords when outputting the information, but I reckon it’d make a cool little tool.
I could probably knock one up meself but I haven’t got the time – so if anyone out there wants to pick up on the idea and build one just let us know.
I don’t think there’s anything like it out there at the moment – I could be wrong of course but i had a quick search and couldn’t see anything that did this.
Over to you…
As you can see from my sidebar, we’ve just gone over 11,000 spam comments blocked by Aksimet (as at 20th August 2008).
I’m not sure how long Nick was running Akismet etc before I took over Internet Babel, but I’ve just read about somebody hitting the million-spams milestone on their blog. I personally block quite a few comments that are human-spam as well, but I was wondering about your experiences with blog comment spam as well. I have a couple of Blogs on the go and I notice a definite variation in the type of spam comments that are aimed at one Blog or another.
IB (at a very rough estimate) gets about 35% Viagra and related, 35% student loans, 20% looking like they lead to nasty downloads and about 10% just utter rubbish (not including the human spam that I discard by hand).
Is that the same kind of spam breakdown that you guys get? How many comments does Akismet block for you each day? According to Aksimet’s own stats, approximately 88% of all comments are spam…
Do you use other tools/plugins to check for spam? If you implemented Captcha did you find a drop in legitimate comment numbers?
I’m thinking of knocking up some PHP code myself to check for human spam, so I can block ‘at source’ things such as those useless ‘nice post’ short comments and have bad word blacklists and that kind of thing. Just wondered what your experiences are….
Spam comments. How annoying! just a quick post to remind all you newbie bloggers about Askimet; comes automatically with WordPress and stops about 98% of all spam. The odd stuff slips through, but it stops THE MAJORITY.
Digg this!
to support the fight against spam! 
Any bloggers who haven’t got this beauty activated, should have! it’s saved me from nearly 2,000 spam comments so far. Imagine how annoying it would have been having to plow through each day and pick them out myself!
