The Year in Spam
It’s not often that one can claim 100% annual growth for something, let alone 1000%. Alas, I can take little credit; it’s all by dint of the efforts of the intrepid (but essentially hapless) spammers. Trackback spam went from a “mere” 9400/month at the beginning of the year to 94,000/month in December.
Trackback spams/month, for 2006.
Automated comment spam also took off in 2006. From essentially nonexistent at the beginning of the year, to 47,000 attempts in December. This last development comes as a bit of a surprise to me. Our comment system is designed to be maximally-confusing to robots, and for years we have been entirely free of robotic comment spam. About mid-year, the robots started doing a better job of finding the comment form to post to. So far, they show no signs of getting any closer to actually succeeding at posting a comment.
Perhaps 2007 will be a good year for the spambot writers. Personally, I hope not …
Re: The Year in Spam
My numbers for comment and trackback spam for Decemeber wer 21,800 trackbacks and 12,000 comments.
Very few comments were successfully posted on the blog. Some (a 100?) ended up in the junk folder and the rest were blocked by your great plugin.
A few spam trackbacks do make it to the blog output every week. So it is a hassle when I am on vacation.
On the other hand, these spammers do increase my server load at times.