In March, Akismet saw 5,426,166,500 spam comments go through. Though this was a rise of 32% since last month, it’s a decrease from last year’s March by 19 percent. It’s been a quiet March.

This image, “North American detail map of Flickr and Twitter locations” by Eric Fischer, is licensed under CC BY 2.0

If we wanted to visualize this number, we could write down each spam comment on a piece of paper and ask each person in the USA to hold on to them. In that case, each person would be holding onto 17 pieces of paper to cover all of the spam we received.

As usual, Akismet saw much less ham go around this month – only about 2.7% of all comments were real comments. We’d need only half of the people in the United States to hold just one piece of paper to cover all the ham comments – there were 147,994,500 total ham comments going through.

Here’s a chart breaking down the numbers per day:

The busiest day of the month was the 20th, with 198,630,500 spam comments. The slowest day was the 15th with 146,041,500.

If you’re having any trouble with spam comments getting through on your site, or any false positives in your spam folder, feel free to contact us so we can help :).

This post is part of a monthly series summarizing some stats and figures from the Akismet universe. Feel free to browse all of the posts in the series.

February was another slow spam month for Akismet. We didn’t even hit 200 million comments on any day this month. You can see the daily breakdown of the spam and ham comments Akismet caught in the graph below:

The busiest day was the first of the month, with about 178 million spam comments — and the slowest day was the 18th with about 106 million.

The total number of spam messages caught this month was 4,090,182,500. To visualize this, let’s say each spam is represented by one blade of grass in a football field — to commemorate the football season ending this February.

How many football fields would it take to cover that much spam? Twelve and a half.

How about the real comments? We got a total of 131,465,000 of those this month. And if each one were represented by a blade of grass, they would take just under one half of a football field to account for. As always, real comments account for much much less than spam comments — about 3% this month.

This month was unusually low in spam numbers not only compared with last month (with a 14% decrease in volume), but also since last year — decreasing by 38% compared with February 2014.

We missed only about 1 in every 10,917 spam comments this month — not bad!

Your own blog’s stats may have followed a similar pattern of decreased spam activity this month. If you are ever finding that the spammers are winning and more comments than usual are getting through Akismet’s filters, please feel free to reach out and let us know. We’re happy to look into it and help restore order :)

This post is part of a monthly series summarizing some stats and figures from the Akismet universe. Feel free to browse all of the posts in the series.

January has been a slow and steady month in Akismet-land. Whereas in months prior, we’ve broken daily spam records, in January the spammers took it easy and we never saw a day with over 300 million spam comments caught.

The busiest day in January was the 4th, with almost 257 million comments, and the slowest was the 29th with just over 174 million comments.

The total number of spam comments caught in January was a mere 6,586,661,000 – compare that to the over 10 billion comments in December, that’s a drop of 35%. We did have more comments this month than the same time last year – 5% more.

This image, “Old Map (90)” by rosario fiore, is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0

Let’s put this number in perspective. The latest figures for the world population were published in 2013 by the world bank, and the number was just over 7 billion.

If we wrote down each spam comment caught this month on a piece of paper, and handed out each of these notes to one person in the world, we’d have enough people on earth to hold all of the papers. In fact, we’d have some people left over that didn’t need to hold a piece of paper.

In contrast there were only 157,555,500 legitimate comments that came through this month. Legitimate comments account for about 2% of all the content Akismet sees come through.

If we wrote down each legitimate comment we got this month on a piece of paper and gave each to one person, we’d need just 2% of the world population in order to hold them all.

As for Akismet’s uptime: there were no service interruptions this month. You can find information about any performance issues on this blog, via Twitter, and on this status page.

You may have also seen a drop in spam comments this month on your own blog. If you are having any issues with spam or with Akismet, please feel free to contact us, we’re happy to help :mrgreen:.

This post is part of a monthly series summarizing some stats and figures from the Akismet universe. Feel free to browse all of the posts in the series.