Akismet Travels to Infinity and Beyond

I think every WordPress user pays daily homage to Akismet, the spam-eating super plugin that keeps things nice and tidy and works tirelessly to remove all traces of spam from the comment sections of millions of websites and blogs worldwide.

However, until Akismet posted their November Stats Roundup I don’t think many of us realised exactly how much we have to thank this handy little application for!

Akismet broke even more records this month, catching in excess of 500 million spam messages per day, which works out as a 44% rise in spam comments caught since October and a 136% rise since November 2013.

Now, to really blow your mind, let’s see how the Akismet developers explained things:

In total, Akismet caught 12,204,897,000 spam messages in November. Let’s compare the number of spam comments Akismet caught to the distance between the Earth and Saturn, which is 1.2 billion kilometres when the two planets are closest together (that’s 746 million miles).

If each spam comment were one kilometre, the total number of spam comments Akismet flagged in November would be enough for 9 one-way trips to Saturn.

So next time you roll your eyes at a spam comment that slipped through the net, cut the poor plugin a bit of slack – it’s had quite the busy year!