One of the reasons I closed comments on this blog was the huge amount of Spam I had to deal with everyday. Since then, the Spam reduced dramatically. Now I don't have to deal with Spam comments, but Trackback and Pingback Spam only. Of course I can close Trackback/Pingback too, but so far they come in manageable count.

Last week, my spam counter crossed one million, thanks to Akismet for doing such a great job. This tool is the biggest single time saver in my blogging since I installed it couple of years ago.

Doing a little calculations to see how much time could have been wasted on this and assuming that if I had to moderate spam manually it would take around 4 seconds to track each of them:

* 1,001,169 comment spams X 4 seconds = 4,004,676 seconds needed for moderating comments.
* 4,004,676 seconds = 66744.6 minutes
* 66744.6 minutes = 1112.41 hours
* 1112.41 hours / 24 = 46.35 days (that's 1.5 months if I worked blogging non-stop 24 hours a day)
* 1112.41 hours / 8 = 139 days (that's 4.6 months if I worked blogging full-time job, 8 hours a day)

More if I took time off for weekends and holidays!!