Blog archive

Back in the early days of blogging and when comment spamming was still fairly small scale (compared to today) one method people used to stop a spambot was to use a CAPTCHA. The idea was that a comment spambot could not read the image and so the comment would fail and you would not get any spam. Obviously the spammers really did not like these CAPTCHA’s so they devoted resources to get around them.

In January 2004 — 5 years ago — Cory Doctorow blogged about pornography being used to get humans to solve captchas for spammers and there were scripts which could defeat different CAPTCHA’s. It is because of those scripts that you can now be faced with images that you struggle to get right. All you want to is leave a comment right?

Companies still believe in the power of the CAPTCHA and they are now very wrong to do so. Where there is a demand  by those wanting to spam there is supply – and it’s less than a cent to spam your blog. At ZDNet’s Security blog they report on an industry which can solve a quarter of a million CAPTCHA’s a day.

You write a post and you would like comments. Using a CAPTCHA to stop a spammer is not going to work. If someone is writing a reply to your post why make them solve some image with distorted letters? They want to think about your post not whether that is an 8 or a B, a 1 or I or l. If people have previously been annoyed by these things they may not even bother trying to leave a comment. You lose here — your blog lost a comment.

Putting visible obstacles to commenting irritates readers and gives spammers something to overcome and the more information spammers have the more likely they are to spam your blog. This is why Akismet works as it does — keep the spammers guessing but let people comment freely. Commenting should be as easy as blogging because that is how to keep your conversations going.

Just a bit after a year after we welcomed Defensio to the market it’s just been announced that that they’re being swallowed by the public security company Websense.

Given the size of Defensio’s team and user base it probably wasn’t a huge acquisition, but this is still an important validation of the  space in general as traditional email anti-spam and security companies have been completely blind to web spam thus far, and in my opinion it’s the fastest growing threat to most businesses today.

(Think about it: if you get a spam in your email, it’s annoying but not the end of the world; if you get a spam on your website it’s immediately visible to your customers who probably won’t be impressed by “buy viagra’s” contribution to the conversation when thinking about your products or services.)

2009 is shaping up to be a pretty interesting year in our world. We’ll definitely be keeping an eye on the ever-increasing players in this market, but more importantly we’ll be listening to you guys and do our best to be as invisible and effective as possible. (Especially as we approach 10 billion spams blocked!)

The Guardian’s Michael Pollitt says some kind words about Akismet in today’s Technology section, as he notes that Comment spammers never take a holiday.

Mullenweg publishes a graph on Akismet.com which shows comments being exceeded by daily spam peaks of more than 25m. Checking out the spam blocked counter on my blog is satisfying, showing that the spammers are going nowhere fast.

As an experiment, I turned off my spam protection to watch the spam-a-minute flow.

Read the full article here.

We did some upgrades to the system last night to do some more finely grained tracking of the per blog and per key amounts of spam, ham, and mistakes moving through the system. It’s starting to expose some interesting data, and it’s kinda fun to play with. I’m curious if folks would be interested in getting access to the data for their key, daily stats and such? No graphs yet, but that’s a logical next step.

Update: This upgrade had a bug that caused some downtime.

Some enterprising folks have made Akismet available for Expression Engine.

We’ve been getting several reports of errors with Akismet after people upgrade to Movable Type 3.31. To be honest we’re not Perl hackers so if you have any clues what might be causing the error and we’ll update this entry with information on a workaround or a new version of the plugin.

Dave is developing an Akismet mod for Coppermine, if you use Coppermine to manage your online photos check it out.

Joel Thoms of Joel.net has written a .NET 2.0 library for Akismet, which we’ve added to our development page. We’ve also had another one of these sent in that I need to upload to the site somewhere.

If you’re on a Microsoft platform and need spam protection for any application that takes user input, this library might be for you.

Update: Here is another .Net class someone did, this time for .Net 1.1. I’ve updated the development page with links to both.

Jeff Capron wrote in to say he’s written a plugin to use Akismet for vBulletin. The site requires an email to check it out, so I haven’t tried it out myself, but if you use the very popular vBulletin forum software you may want to check this out and let us know how it works in the comments.

Markus from phpMix.org has put together a really cool Akismet module for Drupal, which is a very flexible content management system. I’ve added it to our development page. If you’re dealing with big communities of submitted content, Drupal + Akismet might be a good bet for you.