Bloggers are afflicted with a lot of comment and trackback spam. How much, you ask, thrilled at the concentrated navel-gazing necessary to care about such matters?
Thanks to the latest Askimet update, I can show you, in graphic form:
Yes, the pink part is spam, the blue part is ‘ham’. as they amusingly term actual, wanted comments. Additionally, they have this amusing explanation of the ‘ham’ thing:
What the heck is ham doing on my blog? I’m a vegetarian.
Spam most people know as the unwanted commercial comments on their blog, its counterpart we call ham to indicate legitimate comments. On the Akismet mistakes side, missed spam is pretty self-explanitory, but a false positive is what it’s called when we incorrectly identify a legitimate comment as spam. (Which hopefully happens exceedingly rarely.) Also, we’re sorry about the vegetarian thing.
Thanks, Askimet, from bloggers everywhere. And a pox upon spammers.
