It’s been just about a month or so since I switched from Akismet to Defensio.

The Defensio team are good friends of mine – Carl Mercier (uber-developer in charge of things over there) and Mat Balez (as good an instigator as any). They asked me to alpha test their WordPress plugin and I was happy to oblige.

Defensio is now in closed-beta. You can contact them for an invite by visiting the Defensio website.

In January, I wrote a blog post about ways Akismet could be improved. I know Carl and Mat didn’t read that post and decide to build a better spam plugin, but they’ve started to implement some of those ideas in a worthwhile way. They’ve sworn me to some amount of secrecy, so you’ll just have to sign-up for the beta yourself.

In the meantime, the results have been good. It’s not that Akismet does a terrible job, but there doesn’t seem to be much new work being done on it. The Defensio team are committed to making improvements to their existing WordPress plugin, and seeing if they can do a better job of beating spam. Even some of the Administrative interface changes alone make Defensio worthwhile.

Blog spam is a tough nut to crack. Spammers seem intent on making our lives miserable; and it’s frustrating when spam sneaks through, or worse, we find false positives caught in our spam filters. It’s a cat and mouse game that we’ll be playing with spammers for many, many years to come. Defensio may be able to help.