The biggest gathering of WordPress users and developers takes place each year at WordCamp San Francisco. At this year’s three-day event, I gave a short presentation on the history of spam. Here’s the video:

Earlier this year we decided to add an option for individuals to be able to contribute to the running costs of Akismet. We believe that it’s really important that personal bloggers continue to have access to Akismet for free. But, for those that really value Akismet’s spam filtering, we wanted to provide a way to pay something.

So we added a ‘pay what you want’ option to free accounts on the signup page. While the overwhelming majority of people still choose a free account, we’ve seen a good number of people opt to pay, too.

We decided that the easiest way for users to pay something would be to use a slider. From day one this had a smiley face to the right of it. When you move the slider, the smiley changes based on how much you choose to pay. While we’ve tested a lot of things related to our pricing, we’d never tested the effect of the smiley face by itself, until now…

Of those users that chose to pay, here’s how the payments break down:

With smiley

$6 – 20%
$12 – 13%
$18 – 4%
$24 – 33%
$30 – 7%
$36 – 19%
$40 – 2%
$48 – 2%

Without smiley

$6 – 25%
$12 – 33%
$18 – 10%
$30 – 5%
$36 – 27%

Can you spot the huge difference between the two?

It turns out, the $24 mark is the last smiling face position before switching to a slight frown ($18).

Looks like a simple frowning face can get people to double their payment from $12 to $24. We found this data super interesting, what do you think?

On August 8th at 21:53 UTC our API was unavailable due to an incorrect code change for approximately 6 minutes. Our automated systems alerted us to the downtime, at which point we immediately fixed the issue.

Our apologies for the downtime, no one likes to see spam slip through, especially us. We are taking another look at our automated systems to see what can be done to tighten the loop, with some additional measures to specifically prevent this type of error.

This is a good time to mention that the latest version of the Akismet plugin for WordPress has a built in re-check mechanism. If for some reason your WordPress site is unable to reach akismet.com it will automatically schedule the comment to be checked a few minutes later. You can update using the built in plugin updater in WordPress, or download the Akismet WordPress plugin directly for the plugin repository.

Visibility is important for any business with a web presence. HubSpot offers a free tool that helps you visualize how potential customers see your site. It’s an easy way to improve your site’s visibility.

One of the best ways to increase your online presence is to have a blog. As of today, we’re delighted to announce that blogs on HubSpot should have a lot less spam, thanks to their recent implementation of Akismet.

Here’s what one commenter on the HubSpot blog had to say about it:

“Looking forward to better spam protection. I really hate the Air Jordan and Coach ads we get all the time on HubSpot.”

I don’t think we could have put it any better. Welcome to the Akismet family, HubSpot!

If you regularly check your Akismet stats page – that’s in the Dashboard menu of wp-admin if you use WordPress – you might notice some changes soon. That’s because we’re working on some improvements to the way spam stats are recorded and displayed. We plan to make stats more useful for those who need it most, particularly those who use Akismet to monitor forum posts, tweets and so on.

We’ll announce new features here on the Akismet blog and on Twitter, so if you haven’t already, subscribe or follow to keep up.

If you’re the developer of an application, plugin or module that uses Akismet, now is a great time to get in touch via our contact form. We’d love to hear from you and we can help you take advantage of some of our forthcoming improvements.