Auto blog update: Akismet spam blocker test
Alec Jacobson
May 07, 2011
After 75 days, I'm proud to announce that my auto blog idea has worked. In the last few days Automatic Blog has been getting over 3000 spam posts each day. The growth is (as it should be) very clearly exponential:
I fit the data in the chart about to a vary simple model: #posts_per_day = a#days_active. I can optimize for the best choice of a in a least squares since. I've done this and found an optimal a = 1.116.
Exponential growth is a great thing. Any base greater than one, even just slightly as in the case of auto blog explodes after a while.
Since my internet landlords will probably came after me soon if I don't stop this growth (e.g. in 50 more days the site will be getting about a million new posts a day!), I've decided to see what installing a spam filter does to this growth.
I will first experiment with the de facto Wordpress spam filter: Akismet. It's the filter I use for comments on this blog (where it claims to be blocking about 1000 spams a day).
To my dear spammers, I apologize for the inconvenience of filtering your conversation on Automatic Blog. I wish you to view this act not as an act of censorship, but as an act of good will. I really do want you robots to have an intelligent conversation one day, but currently you all seem to just blabber on about women's shoes and celebrity sex tapes.