Mark your calenders because on December 15, 2007, WordPress user’s across the blogosphere will be turning off Akismet. Ok, not really. But Jesper Rønn-Jensen has decided to do it. He calls it, Spam Filter Free day where he will disable the Akismet anti spam tool on his blog for 24 hours to figure out, just how much work Akismet does for him. It’s an ambitious project and I can only imagine how much time it will take to clean up the mess after the event is over with.
I’ve seen numerous bloggers writing posts which state that Akismet is asking for us to disable our spam filter on this day and then report back to them with the results. This is not the case. Akismet merely brought Jesper’s post to the forefront and asked if anyone else would be willing to go through with it. If so, Akismet would love to hear back from you.
I’ve decided not to go through with the project. Like so many others that commented on Lorelle’s article, (Are You Willing To Go Naked For One Day For Akismet) I can see just how much work Akismet has saved me from doing by looking at the spam filter statistics. So far, Akismet has protected this site from 4,528 spam comments. I’ve left my blog alone for more than 24 hours and when I come back, I have to sift through over 100 or more spam comments to see if Mike was flagged as a spammer. Akismet is not perfect, but it does a damn fine job of blocking a lot of spam.
So will you be going naked on December 15?
Thoughts and Insanity From Jeff 
I love it how people have misinterpreted the point. Akismet wants to know if people are “willing” to try this, not to do this. I love seeing it twisted around with interpretations. :D
Still, it’s interesting to see how much people care about Akismet, something many take for granted, not understanding how much work it saves them. Will be interesting to see how and where this goes.
@Lorelle I always appreciate you taking the time to visit this blog Lorelle. I just need to clarify something. Are you saying that I’m the one that misinterpreted what Akismet said on their blog and therefor I have twister it around or are you saying other bloggers have?
By the way, this would make for a good talking point on the next WordPress Podcast :)
I don’t get it. Why do you have to turn off your filter to know how well it works? Everything Akismet filters is stored where you can sift through it to verify it is legit spam.
@Brad Exactly the point of so many others Brad. I think this guy just wants to see how much time will be wasted, manually going through and cleaning up the mess. Once he calculates how much time and work he did to clean up the aftermath, he’ll probably make a post which touts those amounts of time and energy saved by using Akismet.
Akismet already knows they are awesome. However, this is almost like a live demo or commercial for them.
Wow! That number of spam comments is a good indication of how popular your site is. I bet there is a direct relationship between how much spam you get and how popular your site is.
And why, oh why, out of all people is Akismet still picking on me? :(