A new spam blocker called Defensio is attempting to improve on the standard set by Automattic’s Akismet, the default blocker for WordPress.
Defensio boasts a few features lacking in Akismet, most notably the ability to sort your blog’s blocked comments by “spamminess” so you don’t have to wade through them chronologically to find false positives. Defensio will rank comments that it labels as spam according to how likely it thinks the comments are indeed spam, listing the least likely comments on top. The blocker will even color code your blocked comments to help you find the ones you want to approve.
Defensio also adapts to the content of your blog so that it can target spam more effectively. It’s success at blocking the right comments for each individual blog can be tracked, so you’ll know just how well Defensio is performing for you.
Among Defensio’s other innovations is an open API that makes the blocker available for use with non-blogging applications. Defensio also provides RSS feeds for your comments (sorted by spamminess, of course) so you can track them outside of your publishing platform.
Today, the company releases plugins for both WordPress and Pixelpost, and they may release one for the CMS Umbraco as well. Plugins for Rails and .NET developers will also be available. Defensio plans to develop plugins across a wide range of platforms over the coming months.
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One method successfully followed by Huffington Post and Engadget is to allow only registered users to post. But it is a bit inflexible. Annonymous content should also be allowed so that people can come out with Mafia’s in civic and Corportate world with dying a dogs death.
http://tekno-world.blogspot.com
Just signed up and installing now. We’ll see how much of an improvement this is.
Brett
http://www.startupstudents.com
You know, I have problems with Akismet, It seems to ban my email on some of my email or domain name
Anyone can help me on how to get unbanned>?
“Among Defensio’s other innovations is an open API that makes the blocker available for use with non-blogging applications.” Mark, that seems to imply that Akismet doesn’t have such an API. In fact, it does.
Andrew, commenting because the TechCrunch pingback elf seems to have taken a dislike to him - you can see my post about Defensio by following the link from my name.
IMHO that there is not a big differentiator from Akismet.
well, signup is screwed up right now - keeps saying that any URL entered is already in the database…pinged them a few minutes ago to see if they can fix it.
one thing that’s unclear: will they generate one key per free id or one per url for site level tracking?
notice that matt mullenweg has not made defensio available to the larger wordpress community by adding it to the wordpress.org plugin directory. although wordpress is “open” software, i’ve heard he tends to akismet competitors out of there.
There are a lot of WordPress plugins out there that are pretty cool:
http://blog.subscribable.com/?page_id=8
This looks like a pretty decent tool in the battle against spam. Interesting trend I’ve noticed. It looks like trackback spammers (the charming younger cousins of comment spammers) are getting really good at white-listing their spam domains.
If you use a plugin like Spam Karma, take a look at how many of the spam URLs you blacklist end up whitelisted about an hour later.
Hopefully someone comes along to find a way to parse real sites from spammy content scrapers.
Steve, I use Spam Karma 2, along with Akismet, and yes, a lot of trackback spammers show up repeatedly after I confirmed them as spam.
How can they whitelist themselves? I thought the list was managed by individual users (i.e. me).
Mark, sorting by spamminess is definitely something Defensio and Spam Karma do that the Akismet plugin does not, but adapting to the content of your blog and an open API have been part of Akismet since launch.
Akismet has well over a million nodes processing more than 400 million checks a month, and our stats indicate more than 20% of that is non-blog content. Usage includes dating sites, the New York Times, News.com, wikis, splog checking, contact forms, bug trackers, and social networking sites.
John, submissions to the plugin directory can sometimes take a few days to show up, as far as I can tell they have a repository but have not yet checked any code into it. As they just launched today, I’d give them some time, they’re probably very busy.
From Defensio’s FAQ:
Is Defensio a replacement for Akismet?
Yes…
Will Defensio outperform Akismet?
-We can’t make any promises (sorry), but our early testing suggests that Defensio’s performance is very, very good. As with any adaptive filter, it will only improve with time.
My accuracy is not satisfactory. Why?
-If you have recently installed Defensio, then try to be patient. The filter’s learning algorithms take some time (usually no more than a couple weeks) to become very effective…
Does Defensio work in conjunction with other spam filtering plugins?
Not really. We highly recommend that you use Defensio as your stand alone spam filtering solution.
And therein lies the rub. Other plugins, like Spam Karma may sometimes outperform Akismet, but they don’t replace it .. work together. It takes a huge leap of faith to give proven Akismet and replace it with something that may need weeks of learning:-(
@dave - we’re looking into the account sign up issue you’ve raised. tx
@john - we had an oustanding request for access to WP’s plug-in site. that has just been approved, so you’ll soon find Defensio there
@matt - yup, we’re busy
@zoli - certainly Defensio is not for everyone - if you’ve discovered a solution that works for you, by all means, keep on trucking… but we have heard from a number of people that simply needed a spam filtering facility that is not dependent on Akismet in any way. moreover, we feel that a multi-plugin solution to a single problem is probably less than optimal.
i’d also like to point out that while akismet does indeed provide an API (and by the sounds of it, it is well-trafficked!) we’ve constructed Defensio’s public API to be maximally convenient for developers to use, and by that i mean it uses standards and is fully-structured. the feedback we’ve received from our community developers in this regard has been overwhelmingly positive.
Will they succeed or will they fail?
The question is the one posed to many Web 2.0 startups, read the answer here
http://techwaste20.blogspot.co.....cking.html
Oooh, bad news for Automattic. Good thing for their suitor the deal didn’t push through.
Open API?
The most interesting part to me. I was prepared to integrate Automatic’s Akismet API for spam handling on a non-blogging platform, but this Defensio technology looks useful, and with an open API…
Commercial API looks cheaper than Akismet, too, at first glance. Interesting stuff for us developers out there.
I’m not in the mood to sign up for yet *another* service and install yet *another* plugin.
Akismet is getting the job done just fine for me, I’ll stick with it.
Atleast this is not spam
http://lapnol.blogspot.com
This is good news! I will give it a try.
Very cool, will check it out!
Sure, I agree. But I also agree with this statement: Breathing is good, not breathing is bad.