Have you ever watched a trapped fly making futile escape attempts, repeatedly crashing into a window, then fluttering around dazed before repeating the stunt? With the Akismet spam filter built into Wordpres, the comment spammers bear quite a resemblance to the aforementioned fly (man that sounded almost like a commercial…).

A statistic on the front page of Akismet states that “94% of all comments are spam.” I must agree; for the 71 legitimate comments currently posted to this site since January 2006, the Akismet filter has captured 7,211 spam comments – putting my site at an even more astounding ratio: 99.02% of all comments are spam! If I had to manually moderate every single message, I’d be forced to disable commenting – but thanks to Akismet and it’s community of users, I can click a handy “delete all” button and *poof* no more spam.

Now occasionally I glance over the Akismet spam queue… and usually its the same old “Hey nice site, visit mine:” followed by 15 links titled “buy zanax now!” and left by some dimwit named “Bob” or “Bill” with an email address composed of random letters. Today, however, I had one curious comment awaiting me (not yet marked as spam). It went something like this:

What would you do if you
Knew all of the things we knew
Would you stand up for truth
Or would you turn away too
And then what if you saw
All of the things thats wrong
Would you stand tall and strong
Or would you turn and walk away

Followed by a link to some site I’d never heard of. Seeing as how this was posted as a comment to the “About” page (which doesn’t even have a comment box) and it didn’t make a lot of sense, I had to check the link out… and it appears to belong a content scraper trying to make an easy buck. So – a quick click on “Spam It” and that problem was solved (for me and every one else using Akismet).

See, Akismet is peer-to-peer spam blocking. By marking a comment as spam, you enter that into the Akismet database and it will be filtered automatically in the future. The power of the network – like an invisible glass wall for all those stupid spammers!

The moral of the story? Get Akismet… oh and P2P isn’t always bad – in fact, in my opinion, it’s always good.