Why WordPress.com has so little spam

I came across a great post today on PlagiarismToday entitled Why WordPress.com is virtually spam free. It’s a well thought-out and researched article where Jonathan Bailey goes into why WordPress.com is partically the only blogging community that is pretty much free of splogs, spam and other nasty stuff.

The article points out that the site owners claim this is mainly down to the human element, that they have encouraged and trained their citizens to report spam as soon as it happens and deal with it swiftly and effectively. I’m a bit more cyncal than that and believe it’s down to the policy and technology.

  • WordPress.com have a strict policy that restricts their bloggers from monetising their blog. This cause shocks in the PayPerPost community some time back, where PayPerPost blogs were kicked out for contravening WordPress’ TOS. It’s a harsh rule, but it eventually boils down to a lack of incentive for people to set up splogs on WordPress.com. If there’s no financial incentive in doing this, nobody will bother.
  • One word: Askimet. Askimet impresses me every single day. It blocks around 500 spam messages a day across my blogs (and increasing daily) without batting an eyelid. Askimet was one of the main reasons I switched to WordPress and WordPress.com uses it as an integral part of their service, keeping their blog clean from spam.

If you want more details, head down to Jonathan’s post

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