New WordPress Plugin for Spam: Defensio
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.
Thanks Ben — we’re definitely banging away hard at the spam problem, and like you say it’s a tough nut to crack.
We’re looking forward to rolling out more beta invites soon.
And a big public Thank You, for being one of our first, and most patient, testers.
Cheers,
Mat
Defensio.com
Thanks for the tip, Ben. I just popped over to sign up for the next Beta test. Since so many people were complaining about Askimet, I never bothered with it. The spam didn’t bother me at first (actually, it gave me a perverse feeling that I’d arrived; Thoughts & Philosophies was big enough to get spammed
). Now Thoughts is big enough to warrant a good filter.
Psst … hey buddy … I got lots of WP sites … psst even moved my own to WP …
Tris - The Defensio people tell me that more beta test accounts will be going out soon. They know you’re at the top of the list!
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