When we switched from standalone WordPress to WordPress MU for the Walker Blogs, we also switched from Spam Karma 2 to Defensio. Spam Karma 2 had its funky interface issues on the admin, but it worked really well keeping our comment spam at bay.
We’ve been using Defensio for not quite two months, which should be plenty of time to train the filters, but our statistics aren’t that great:
Recent accuracy: 97.10%:
- 3708 spam
- 147 legitimate comments
- 135 false negatives (undetected spam)
- 12 false positives (legitimate comments identified as spam)
I’ve never had great confidence in Akismet, but perhaps my misgivings are unfounded. Are there any other spam comment plug-ins people like? What have been your experiences?
What I’d really love to see is a comment plugin that used an Akismit-like baysein filter for catching the big stuff, than Amazon Mechanical Turk to test the stuff it’s not sure about. I’d pay $0.10 a comment for that.
I use Akismet on my personal blog and it rarely disappoints. It has captured 2,390 spam comments since I installed it, about 10 months ago. None of them have been legitimate comments, and only about 5 spam comments have been allowed to post. That’s a pretty decent accuracy rate. However, I didn’t always use Akismet so I don’t know how many of the 318 approved comments were approved while that plugin was activated, I’m not sure of the exact rate. My blog obviously receives fewer comments and traffic than this one so who knows if this was helpful, but there it is.
Oh, Akismet also allows you to automatically discard spam comments left on posts older than a month. I don’t use that option because I sometimes go a month without posting.
Comment by Ang — December 2, 2008 @ 12:03 pm
http://mollom.com/ looks promising — it’s one of the businesses Drupal’s founder recently started
Comment by joe — December 2, 2008 @ 12:22 pm
I found just adding a CAPTCHA plug-in to Wordpress solves all my spam problems. I haven’t had a single spam in 3 years with CAPTCHA.
Giv
Comment by Giv — December 3, 2008 @ 9:01 am
@Joe - Mollom looks really interesting. And free for the volume of ham comments we see here. Going to try that one out.
Comment by Justin Heideman — December 4, 2008 @ 4:42 pm