I just took a short nap. About an hour and a half.
While I was sleeping on the couch Akismet blocked 453 spams from getting into my comments here.
I’m getting more than 10,000 comment spams on some days. It’s really amazing how good a job Akismet does.
How does it work? Well, it learns from everyone’s spam marking behavior. It presents me with some spam (I block all first-timers from going directly into comments and need to approve everything). When I mark stuff as spam it’ll probably mark it as spam on your blog, saving you a lot of work.
So, Akismet, and other spam blockers, are spreading the workload out to everyone.
If it weren’t for Akismet I would have turned off my comments long ago.
Thank you Akismet! And to Automattic, the parent company (they also build Wordpress.com, which is the blog service I use to blog here), started by Matt Mullenweg. Really brilliant service.
UPDATE: funny, while writing this post it blocked another 25.