I’ve been using the Defensio anti-spam plugin on here for a couple of weeks now. I’m a happy man … and I believe it’s superior to the defacto wordpress spam blocker, Akismet. Why?
1. Defensio seems better at learning what’s spam and what’s not – and it admits its mistakes. there’s an nice little performance tracker in the admin panel that looks like this:
* Recent accuracy: 99.35%
* 2191 spam
* 42 legitimate comments
* 10 false negatives (undetected spam)
* 4 false positives (legitimate comments identified as spam)
2. Because of the above, it feels like you have more control over it – Akismet rules your blog’s comment section with an invisible fist of iron… Defensio seems much more laid back – like you can hang out with it and say, hey man, that wasn’t spam, and defensio will be like, dude, sorry about that, i’ll try to remember that next time!
3. It ranks by spaminess … and obvious spam gets hidden, so you don’t have to go thru the hundreds of spam comments that Akismet makes you sift thru (if you want to bother), only the “possible” spam that might be legit.
4. The interface somehow feels friendly and inviting (maybe because I know some of the guys involved in the project?)
I’m unsure as to whether to be impressed or troubled by the thought of you “hanging out” with your spam filter. It would be cool if people like you wrote software that way (to interact with, say, in the way that we interact with human beings).
I guess my equivalent would be “smoking a j and talking metaphysics” with my Beowulf distributed computing cluster.
Defensio also calls me “dude” sometimes and it makes me feel warm inside. lol!
Thanks for the kind words Hugh, keep us posted!
admitting when you’re wrong is not only the way to build software, but also the way to lead a decent life
“dude, sorry about that, i’ll try to remember that next time!” BWA HA HA