I was idly clicking through the tabs on my blog’s management pages, and noticed this little fact. Akismet Spam is module I have installed to intercept spammy comments that robots and mindless minions of the interwebs evil forces leave on this site. I was astonished to see that it has blocked 134,985 spam comments in just under two years. Averages over 6,100 spams a month, or about 230 each and every single day (pr0n, mostly).
Without Akismet it would simply be impossible to for me to allow comments on the blog. Its great that there are tools to deal with this blight, but on the other hand it’s sad that we need the tools in the first place.
And you’re welcome for the gratuitous Monty Python reference.
Not a Monty Python reference, but…
Hormel Foods Corporation owns the Spam brand (http://spam.com/).
Hormel also operates The Hormel Institute with the University of Minnesota Graduate School (http://www.hormelfoods.com/responsibility/philanthropy/hormelInstitute.aspx), which is a cancer research facility.
Earlier this year, The Hormel Institute announced the purchase of an IBM Blue Gene platform (http://www.bizjournals.com/twincities/stories/2008/02/04/daily27.html).
So now it can be summarized that HPC and Spam are now inexplicity linked together.
JB – sorry for the delay. The links put the comment in the spam queue (oh, the irony!) and I had to fish it out. Awesome 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon variant.