Akismet

It’s hard to have a market with only one player. Though web spam is a huge problem touching countless millions of people, there are still only a few ways to stem the tide. Outside of Akismet, almost all solutions thus far have been user-hostile, like CAPTCHA, not adaptive, like all the one-off solutions people do, or falsely assume that web spam is anything like email spam. (There was briefly an Akismet clone called Linksieve, but I can’t find it on the web anymore.)

Today we would like to welcome a new entrant to our nascent market, Defensio. They have a similar approach to us, with a centralized API that gives a thumbs up or down for a comment, and some added information indicating “spamminess.” Best of luck, guys!

(And for those wondering, Akismet only returns “yes” or “no” to avoid giving spammers any additional information. However the interface for managing spam could definitely be better.)

If you’re curious about some techniques of spammers and the intersection between economics and spam, check out this talk by Ross Anderson at Google:

We had a 40 minute downtime in our San Antonio location last night. This probably caused some obvious spam on your blog to be missed by Akismet.

We’re obviously looking on the systems side at what happened and how to prevent it, but also on the client side we’d like to make the WP plugin deal more gracefully with not being able to contact the mothership.

Kristof Coomans (who has the shortest email address I’ve ever seen, 8 characters) wrote in to tell us that there is now an Akismet plugin for the EZ Publish content management system.

Spam is growing.

From 0 to 1,000,000: 70 days

From 1,000,000 to 100,000,000: 190 days

100,000,000 to 1,000,000,000: 257 days

1 billion to 2 billion: 108 days

It’s funny how fast that last billion went. To celebrate we made a new chart showing total spam blocked over time.

Scott Hemmeter wrote in to tell us that many web forms across the web feed into Salesforce.com so people can track the responses and such from them. Like any other form on the web these get spammed to death. Scott has cooked up a solution, combining Akismet and Salesforce to combat spam:

Back in January, I posted about a way to help combat web to lead spam. That type of solution works well, but is not scalable. Also, it is a reactive approach rather than a proactive one.

I decided to try and see if I could incorporate Akismet into the web to lead process and I was successful in doing so! I created a set of scripts for you to download if you’d like to leverage Akismet with your web to lead forms.

Read the rest and download the script.

Remember Postnuke? They now have an Akismet module, which when used with EZComments gives you all the Akismet goodness you’ve come to expect.

Paul Benetis found something interesting on his blog:

After setting it up I started loading it with articles. Everything was gravy until maybe an hour after the initial setup. The blog started to crawl. I mean it was completely unusable. The counter on the bottom clocked the page loads at around 75 seconds. What could be the problem? I started looking for a solution.

That in and of itself isn’t terribly unusual, there are a thousand things that can cause a blog to be slow, but check out what Paul found:

I went ahead and activated Akismet (it took about 5 minutes to navigate to the activation page!!!). Right when I pressed the activate button the blog started acting like any WordPress blog should, fast as hell! Thank you Akismet!

You can read the whole story on his blog. Thanks for sharing Paul!

MyBulletinBoard now has an Akismet mod. I think the non-blog implementations of WordPress now outnumber the blog ones, it’s obvious that web spam is a very prevalent problem and I’m excited about all this new data coming from so many sources.

tDiary is a blog tool famous in Japan, which should become more famous now that Tadashi Tada has developed an Akismet library for it.