We’re all familiar with Akismet since it comes loaded with every WordPress installation. Aside from that, there’s not much choice for an anti-spam defense for our blogs anywhere.
Well, what we usually do is complement the Akismet system with other spam defenders like captchas, Spam Karma 2, Bad Behavior, Simple Math, etc. That basically leaves Akismet as the only centralized anti comment-spam system around.
Now there’s a new player in that space and they aptly called it Defensio. It’s basically similar to Akismet with a little more improvements on the side. Both are based on a centralized system with APIs.
However, while Akismet only tells you if a comment is spam or not spam, Defensio takes it a little further by allowing you to set a spaminess rating between 50% to 95% (neat!) — with Defensio you simply need to monitor the top portion of your quarantine to be confident that there’s no ham amongst your spam.
The system is not only limited to WordPress blogs too. It currently supports WordPress, Pixelpost, Umbraco, Drupal, Mephisto, MovableType, and TextPattern. And since they’ve provided an open API, you can use their system to create your own plugin for any social web application (it’s not just for blogs). Developer plugins are also available in Ruby on Rails, Microsoft.NET, Java, Python, and PHP.
You will need to disable Akismet though in order to run this plugin. Been running it for a couple of hours now on this blog and so far it’s running at 100% accuracy. And unlike Akismet, I hope all those legit commenters who are consistently being thrown in the spam box will see the light of day this time around.
Vastly exotic blog column.