Akismet

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.

If you’re using HTTP 1.1 in your Akismet client, or the one in PEAR, there’s a bug that could cause your client to timeout.

The problem does not lie with Akismet servers, the problem lies in an incorrect implementation of HTTP/1.1 persistent connections in the Akismet class. The Akismet API servers support persistent connections for HTTP/1.1 but the class is not written to use persistent connections. Specifying a ‘Connection: close’ header will fix the problem for HTTP/1.1.

Read more about the problem here.

Subkismet 1.0 Released : Keyvan Nayyeri

Subkismet is a framework to fight against spam in .NET web applications which assists .NET developers to stop spammers and defeat them. Subkismet is actually a set of controls, service clients and other tools to accomplish this goal but we’re making it a framework smoothly

Spammers say the darndest things:

I have a great idea for a Broadway show, My company is Lice**** the professional service for the removal of head lice. The anguish,helplessness, and then the relief of the Parents with children with head lice is a wonderfull setting for a Broadway hit. Please contact me at 917-***-****.

Tickets go on sale… never.

To celebrate Akismet day we have a new version of the WordPress plugin for y’all.

Version 2.1 main new addition is the ability to filter by comment type, as seen here:

There’s also a new hook so other plugins could add addition tabs to the sub-nav as well — I’m curious to see what people end up putting there. If you use that hook for a plugin, be sure to let me know so we can blog about it.

Update: There were two small bugs, if you have 2.1.2 all errors (headers sent, etc) should be fixed.

“Please do not delete this. Money obtained from spam will go to children in uganda.”

Uh huh. I’ll get right on that.