Daniel Davies

I had started to really get in to this whole blogging thing, but then I discovered a hidden cost to it all. The payment being given in time. Spam, and its effect on the server, and your time as you clean it all out.

Until I hit page rank 5 spam was flattering and very rare. Maybe once a week I'd get a couple of comments show up as spam. Now-a-days I'm getting around 3000 spams a day hitting the blog. Akismet couldn't cope (or more, my server couldn't cope sending them all off to Akismet), and for the last few days the blog has been down as the barrage of spam effectively creates a distributed denial of service attack on to the blog.

I have thus had to toughen up my spam procedures and sadly, this is now going to cost me time. Every comment now needs to be verified by myself. Akismet let around 300 spam comments through so I can't rely on it completely. In order to reduce the amount of spam I have to discard I've now set a one month limit on posts. After a month, unless I flag it so, comments are closed. Its a little awkward and not ideal, but to really give you some idea of why, here's how much traffic my site receives.

Considering this website is pretty much the only thing on that server, and this blog (according to Analytics) is lucky to see 100 visits a day, that's an awful lot of traffic. Compare it to a graph from the same time period against that of Stringer, my web server which runs all email and about 10 fairly busyish websites and you'll see how much of a problem spam has become.