". Despite being just as free as its competitors and placing few restrictions on registration, Wordpress.com has not endured the spam avalanche that other services have."

", the spammers have been easily shut down and, overall, the service remains relatively free of the splogs that seem to choke up its competitors. Though paid services such as "

" also enjoy a relatively spam-free existance, what Wordpress.com does is very rare for a free service."

"Akismet works by taking comments submitted to a site and forwarding them to Akismet?s servers. Akismet then, using a series of tests and filters, determines if the comment is legitimate, spam or something in between. Spam comments are filtered out, gray comments are held for moderation and legitimate comments are posted."

", not just those hosted by Wordpress.com. To date, Akismet has stopped over one billion spam comments and is used on thousands of blogs, including this one."

" and Mullenweg hint that Akismet is one of their tools for keeping spam blogs off of Wordpress.com. Though both are vague with their descriptions as to how it works, one likelihood is that any caught comment spam originating or pointing to a Wordpress.com flags the site for inspection."

"If true, this effectively turns comment spamming, one of the most popular means of promoting a spam blog, against the person doing it. Comment spamming goes from being a tool to help search engines find a blog to a means for administrators to easily identify the blogs that are likely junk."

"That would be an interesting reversal of fortune for spammers and a very intelligent use of a seemingly unrelated technology."

" from its service. As of this writing, there is no way to add any advertisements to a Wordpress.com hosted blog, other than ?discreet? links, without a "

"This is obviously a tremendous deterrent to spam blogs, many of which rely upon Google Adsense to make money. This is in stark contrast to Blogspot, which makes it "

"Though Google?s reasons for doing this are clear, it is how they make money from the service, the prevalence of Adsense has undoubdtedly been a major contributor to the deluge of spam that has befallen the service. That is also why Mullenweg, in a "

"Weā??re considering ad options for the future, but for now disallowing adsense has been a huge help in keeping splogs off the system and hasnā??t gotten much pushback from regular folks, only aspiring pro-bloggers. (Who should probably be on WordPress.org anyway.)"

"While it is true that this has no impact on the spam bloggers that are solely interested in using the splogs to gain search engine ranking via outbound liks, this missing functionality does a great deal to deter many of the laziest and least sophisticated spam bloggers out there."

"All in all, while the lack of simple monetization might be a hurdle for some would-be Wordpress.com users, it has played a critical role in keeping the service free of spam blogs."

"But while Mullenweg was clearly pleased with the role that Akismet and other tools played in stopping spam, he put the greatest difference on the human element."

"According to him, Automattic takes spam very seriously and always has and that, in his view, makes the greatest difference of all. In his email to me he said the following:"

"If you ever come across something we host that?s spam just drop the link there and someone will look at it within an hour or so."

"Akismet and a few other internal tools help, but I think it?s mostly that we take splogs pretty seriously and respond accordingly.."

"? feature in the dashboard across the top of all Wordpress.com blogs to report any instance of spam. He says that all reports of spam are tracked and followed up on swiftly."

"This, in Mullenweg?s view, has kept spam from establishing a foothold on the service and kept Wordpress.com relatively spam-free when compared to its competitors. Hopefully, it will be enough to keep it that way."

"The good news in all of this is that it is possible to run a large-scale, popular and free blogging service that is relatively free of spam. The bad news is that there is no magic bullet in any of this."

"Running such a service requires a great deal of commitment both from the people who run the service and from the community that uses it. It requires investing both resources and manpower into combating spam while having a genuine dislike for it. It even requires, in some cases, sacrificing features that legitimate users may want in order to make the service less appealing to the spam blogging community."

"It also means that it may be far too late for Blogspot and similar services to turn the tide against spam. Though Wordpress.com seems to easily be able to keep up with new spam that comes in, it appears that, if over three quarters of your results are junk, that the reversing the tide is all-but-impossible."

"However, if Google were to take the simple, but drastic, step of banning Adsense on Blogspot, the effect on spam blogs would be drastic. However, the effect on their legitimate bloggers would be equally dramatic, causing many of them to turn away from the service."

"This puts Google, and the other free blogging services, in a very tough bind. In order to effectively combat spam, they need to make sacrifices that will, most likely, cause them to lose legitimate customers as well as spammers. It almost comes down to a choice between being a spam haven and having their entire business model destroyed."

"In that regard, spam blogs are like a cancer, often easily treated if caught and attacked early, but incurable if allowed to go on to long. Sadly, Blogger, AOL Hometown and MSN Spaces may be beyond any hope of recovery."

" as well as Matt Mullenweg?s blog have really drawn a great deal of attention to this. So welcome to everyone who is visiting this site for the first time. Feel free to look around some and "

". As it turns out, the methodology of the study is both buried and confusing. It turns out that 77% of Blogspot blogs are spam for spam-friendly keywords. It is not a reference to the number of spam blogs on the service over all."

"However, after thinking about it, I realized that a study of the blogs on Blogspot would be almost useless as Blogspot, in addition to splogs, is choked down with with inactive and abandoned blogs, the same as with any free blogging service or free Web service in general."

"A better study would be to look at the percentage of active blogs on the service, something that can be determined, at least with some distinction, but the number of outgoing pings. "

"This means that over half of all new posts created and pinged out over Blogspot are junk. Though not the 77% mentioned earlier, that is still a tremendous problem. The fact remains that Blogger is, quite clearly, overrun with spam blogs and is unlikely to recover any time soon, not without making drastic changes."

"It?s weird, I run into Wordpress driven scraper blogs more often than any other. Perhaps it?s that they are easily identified as being run on Wordpress software than other ones. (They?re not hosted on wordpress, just using their blogging platform.)"

"Not to sound like a jerk but I like Wordpress.com?s prohibition of advertisements. If you want ads on your site, buy your own domain."

"It would be nice if that would at least give the API to Digg so I can cross post my stuff to the Wordpress.com site I have."

"I have a blogger Link page that I put my best Links to articles I?ve posted on my main site. Would like to do the same with Wordpress.com."

"Just to clarify, there?s a difference between being a WP-driven blog and one hosted on Wordpress.com. Wordpress.com uses WP as a backend but is a complete blog service, like Blogspot. A lot scrapers are using their own installs of WP right now because A) It?s Free B) Easily Automated and C) Has available plugins to do the scraping."

"I have to agree with you on that one. I don?t see why free blogging services should try to turn users into pro bloggers. Those wanting to profit from a blog should at least make the minor investment in their own hosting."

"I?d wager that there are a lot of things that Wordpress.com could/should do that wouldn?t drastically impact spam."

"I?d send the suggestions on and see if they take them up. They were very responsive to me and my questions."

"[?] PlagiarismToday Ā» Why Wordpress.com is Virtually Spam Free. I wouldn?t ever suggest there are no splogs on WordPress.com, I?m sure some have slipped through the cracks, but we do take the issue very seriously with both of proactive and reactive measures. « McAfee CEO Comment Ā» [?]"

"[?] Plagiarism Today?Why WordPress.com is Virtually Spam Free It seems as if nearly every major free blog hosting service has been either overrun or nearly overrun with spam. However, one services stands alone, a relative oasis of spam cleanliness, Automatticā??s Wordpress.com. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. [?]"

"[?] Monday, April 9th, 2007 in Automattic, Akismet, WordPress According to a WebMasterWorld study, 75% of blogs on Google?s Blogger are spam and 68% of all sites on the .info domain are spam as well. If true, that?s kind of depressing. Meanwhile, on WordPress.com we continue to shut down spam blogs as soon as we find them. [?]"

"[?] spam blogs, and it turns out that most free blogging services are loaded with splogs. Except for one. Wordpress.com It seems as if nearly every major free blog hosting service has been either overrun [?]"

"Nice article! It seems that taking a ?broken windows? approach (preventing spam from even getting a foothold) is pretty effective. I wonder if Matt sees much trouble with redirect spam, or if the limited template control on free Wordpress.com makes that impossible."

"Oh, and just a heads-up that ?77% of all blogs on Blogspot are spam? is a mis-reading of the study. Explanation here: "

"JB - that was exactly the point I was making. Though they?re keeping it off their own free-hosting system, their easy to use system that accepts plug-ins means that many scraper blogs are using Wordpress."

"Another
... read the whole article