Akismet is getting the job done just fine for me, I’ll stick with it.

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…

The question is the one posed to many Web 2.0 startups, read the answer here

http://techwaste20.blogspot.co.....cking.html

@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.

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:-(

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.

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.

one thing that’s unclear: will they generate one key per free id or one per url for site level tracking?