End-of-year posts seem to have become the tradition these days, so I'm back again with a third Year in Spam. Welcome back, folks, to another round of statistics you never needed to know.
All times/dates are UTC.
The Big Number
In total, we saw 35,636 spam posts this year across the network. That's down from last year:
Year | Posts | % change |
---|---|---|
2016 | 31578 | |
2017 | 39656 | +25.6% |
2018 | 35636 | -10.1% |
Posts By Site
Ask Ubuntu continues to catch up with Stack Overflow this year - from a difference of just under 7% last year it's now down to just over 4% behind. Other sites in the top 20 remain in fairly similar places, although The Workplace has dropped significantly.
Site Name | Post Count | % of Total |
---|---|---|
Stack Overflow | 6892 | 17.3795% |
Ask Ubuntu | 5237 | 13.2061% |
Super User | 3294 | 8.3064% |
Drupal Answers | 2058 | 5.1896% |
Ask Different | 1853 | 4.6727% |
Graphic Design | 1687 | 4.2541% |
Meta Stack Exchange | 1468 | 3.7018% |
Astronomy | 620 | 1.5634% |
English Language & Usage | 600 | 1.5130% |
Bitcoin | 561 | 1.4147% |
Role-playing Games | 559 | 1.4096% |
WordPress Development | 483 | 1.2180% |
Puzzling | 450 | 1.1348% |
Web Applications | 437 | 1.1020% |
Travel | 416 | 1.0490% |
The Workplace | 362 | 0.9129% |
Arqade | 324 | 0.8170% |
Android Enthusiasts | 323 | 0.8145% |
Personal Finance & Money | 320 | 0.8069% |
Mathematics | 309 | 0.7792% |
Truncated to top 20 sites. View full data.
Posts By Time
2018 has mostly followed 2017's line in this regard, though spam has been a little more spread out through the day (i.e. less confined to peak hours). Behold - the chart returns (the y axis represents the proportion of spam posts created in each hour group).
Time to Deletion
2018 was not a great year in this regard — despite (or perhaps because of - we're not really sure1) improvements to the autoflagging system. The time it takes, on average, to delete a spam post, was higher at all hours of the day than it was in 2017 (although there are still some gains over 2016).
Speaking of autoflagging...
Autoflagging
Charcoal's autoflagging project currently stands at 45,183 posts flagged, of which 44,990 were confirmed to be spam - that's 99.57% accurate overall. There are 335 users participating - 31 of those users are moderators, of 173 36 sites between them (bad Catija, skewing my numbers with CM multi-diamonds).
This graph shows the overall progress of the project: a number of posts flagged and flags cast per month, since inception.
1 This could also be down to improvements in TTD tracking this year, which remove a previous minor bias towards lower values.