Zit Seng's Blog

A Singaporean's technology and lifestyle blog

Spam in the Blog

DSC01438There are some 23K spam in my blog comment queue right now. All received within the last 2 weeks or so. I was just poking around my WordPress admin panel and noticed the spam statistics. I’ve received some 273K spam in the lifetime of this blog (which is 5+ years old). 102K within the last 6 months. The spam rate is increasing exponentially.

Thank goodness for effective spam filtering tools like Akismet on WordPress, I can still enjoy blogging instead of pulling my hair out sifting through spam. 23K spam in 2 weeks is like 1.6K per day. You couldn’t even read 1.6K of emails if that were your full-time job. I don’t think my regular email account even receives that many spam a day.

It seems a lot of bandwidth taken up by the blog then actually comes about from spam. It’s crazy. By comparing the web access statistics and spam statistics, it seems like some 28% of the page access to this site is spam. Think about all the bandwidth consumed.

Fortunately for me, my hosting account comes with unlimited bandwidth. Otherwise I think I’ll be obsessively watching the bandwidth wastage.

Tools like Akismet are really effective. Gmail seems to be pretty good too. Nice that human time is not spent reading spam. But at the rate things are going, I’m beginning to wonder of spam would excessively consume bandwidth so that that could itself become a problem. DoS by spam.

If you were in a SME, how would you feel if 50% of your Internet bandwidth is actually spam?

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