Akismet

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.

We’ve improved the accuracy of the Akismet stats feature that was introduced in Akismet 2.2.1. You might notice a slight change in the total spam, comments and accuracy figures reported at the top of your stats page, and the percentages shown in the pie chart. The Historical Stats figures and time graphs are unaffected – these were correct all along.

There’s no plugin upgrade required.

Our overall spam statistics remain unchanged, and Akismet is as accurate as ever.

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!)

Michael Manfre has created a plugin for Textpattern . You can download the plugin from his website and have protection from the spam. Thanks Michael!

The latest release of Gallery (2.3) now has Akismet support built in. Thanks to Chris for letting us know.

Kevin at BIGACE CMS has developed a commenting extension which uses Akismet. 

And lastly but by no means least the latest version of vBulletin blog also has Akismet support by default.

If you upgraded to Akismet 2.2, you likely noticed a cool new feature: Akismet stats. We’ve now released Akismet 2.2.1, which includes a few bug fixes.

Akismet stats track your comment metrics, including missed spam, false positives (Akismet thought it was spam, but you disagreed), and Yummy Pie, which displays your ham vs. spam count in a nifty pie chart.

What’s ham? The good stuff. Delicious, legitimate comments. Spam is the non-legitimate filler that Akismet excels at blocking.

We’ve also made significant backend changes to speed up Akismet’s response time. If you think a comment is spam (or ham), the system will now adapt instantly to your feedback — a major improvement over the old adaptation time, which could take a few days.

Bermi Ferrer wrote an Akismet plugin for the Akelos PHP Framework, a Rails port to PHP. Check out his documentation on the Akelos wiki and grab the code here.

Aydin Mirzaee, an undergraduate student at McGill University, Samuel Cormier-Iijima has whipped up some handy code to incorporate Akismet with Django’s new comments framework. Python geeks, enjoy

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.

There is a new Code Igniter library for working with Akismet built by Elliot Haughin.

Code Igniter is a new PHP framework by our friends at Ellis Labs, the makers of pMachine and Expression Engine.