Owing the to the almost ludicrous amount of spam this blog sees, I’ve started using a rather excellent looking web service called Akismet which is based around a plugin for the blog software WordPress.
The idea is that you submit all comment traffic to their service, they run a bunch of checks on it and some associated meta data and it return a boolean value as to whether or not the comment is spam.
The idea is very good, but in practice it might be a little harsh - I’ve had no comment spam make it through for the last week, but then again I’ve had no comments make it through either.
Thankfully, you can help train the filter by subitting false positives and uh, true negatives(?). Consequently comments that get caught by the filter will now await moderation rather than be dropped automatically, so don’t despair if you get bitten.
I like it so much, I’ve written a PHP5 class you can use to include Akismet functionality in your own web adventures.
- Update -
Matt Mullenweg (the guy behind Akismet) has blogged about my PHP class and added it to the development page on the Akismet website. This makes me very happy.
Popularity: 7% [?]
January 17th, 2006 at 6:03 pm
doesn’t look very filtered to me…
: P
January 17th, 2006 at 6:16 pm
Hmm. It doesn’t appear to work in its favour, no.
Then again maybe you don’t fit the profile.