Matt Mullenweg, one of the people behind Wordpress, asks: when will Akismet (the spam-catching service) hit one billion spams caught?
The answer, given that looking at Akismet's stats on Thursday evening (UK time) shows 987m caught, must be "pretty damn soon".
And amidst all that, Akismet has only found 52m "ham" comments - that is, real ones.
That means that for blogs where Akismet does the spam-catching, 95% of comments are spam. That's 19 in every 20.
Quite what the implications are for blogs isn't entirely clear, but one thing is: you can't leave spam handling to be done by hand. Computers are the only way to handle it.
(One confounding fact on this is that Akismet only started in October/November 2005, and protects a rapidly-growing number of blogs - so the rising graph doesn't necessarily reflect a growth in the absolute amount of comment spam. But you'd probably bet on it.)
