The biggest single time saver in my blogging is a plugin that many of us take for granted – but which has literally saved me days and days of time.
What it’s done for me can be summed up in this little screen capture taken from the back end of ProBlogger:
Yes – last night the amount of spam comments that Akismet has filtered here at ProBlogger passed the ‘magical’ 2 million mark.
That’s a frightening statistic on numerous levels.
For starters it shows just how big the problem of comment spam is (I think I started using this about 18 months ago).
Also frightening is the thought of life without Akismet.
Lets do a little arithmetic and see what using it has done for my life:
Let’s assume that if I had to moderate spam comments manually here at ProBlogger that it would take around 2 seconds to do each one (I think it could be more than that as it can take a while to track them all down – I know this because when Akismet’s server has gone down for an hour or so it takes forever).
- 2,000,000 comment spams X 2 seconds = 4,000,000 seconds needed for moderating comments.
- 4,000,000 seconds = 66666.666667 minutes
- 66666.666667 minutes = 1111.111111 hours
- 1111.111111 hours = 46.2962 days
Akismet has saved me 46.29 days in the last 18 months. That’s 1.5 months (working non stop 24 hours a day).
Considering that I don’t work 24 hours a day – if I worked 8 hour days it would have taken me 138.88 days (4.6 months) to moderate all those comments manually – more if I took time off for weekends and holidays.
Do you think that I’m happy that I installed Akismet? You bet your life I am!
Update – as has been suggested in comments below – I would strongly encourage you to sign up as a commercial or ‘pro blogging’ users of Akismet if you’re making money from your blog. As part of b5media – ProBlogger uses a license that we pay for. This enables Akismet to keep improving.
