Why all of the comment spam?!?!?!

I actually had to e-mail the folks at Akismet last month because I saw this and just naturally assumed that either my API key was being used by another site or there was something wrong with my site, or something…

akismet_spam

…because seriously, I’ve gotten 15x more comment spam on this site in the last four months than I have in the entire lifetime of the site! 😯

The nice lady at Akismet assured me that it actually wasn’t anything specific with my site and that the numbers I was seeing were in fact part of a larger trend in global spam that they’ve been filtering recently … which still seems weird because of all of my other sites that accept comments, I haven’t seen anywhere near these numbers! Plus it’s not like I’ve seen the extra pageviews to make it worthwhile, although as she pointed out, they’re probably mostly bots hitting the comment form without actually loading the pages in any sort of useful way.

It’s weird because when I randomly look through my web server logs, this one post where I reviewed The Michael J. Fox Show always seems to make an appearance, along with a couple of other random yet consistent posts – you’d think it’d be more scattered, considering that this blog has upwards of 3,000 posts, but who knows.

I just cringe at the thought of how many server resources are being wasted to accommodate over a hundred thousand fake comments a month when in reality this little blog actually gets much, much less traffic than that. 😕

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