Why spammers have no holiday

It's the silly season for comment spam. Why else would spammers be promoting mercury vapor lamps, poker and porn in late July? While they are lying on a beach somewhere, their spamming software remains hard at work paying for the next long-haul holiday.

If you run a blog, then dealing with comment spam is an around-the-clock operation too. I've now attracted more than 342,000 blog spam (comments and trackbacks) in just over two years to my blog (michaelpollitt.com). That's a big number for a relatively unimportant blog and, if I did nothing, would very quickly overwhelm it.

In October 2005, the high-profile founding developer of the blogging software WordPress, Matthew Mullenweg, wrote a WordPress plugin (Akismet) and set up a web service to combat the spam menace. It also now works with other blogging systems, giving more bloggers much-needed spam protection. Akismet saves everyone the time they'd otherwise waste constantly deleting spam.