Defensio Spam Detection
Mon, October 12th 2009 at 03:31pm
Recently when I was looking into updating my blogging software I spent a bit of time looking at comment spam solutions. Before the site upgrade I had had comments disabled for a long time, even with user accounts the number of spammy users, and comments was high on my Drupal blog. So I knew I needed some solution if I was going to activate comments again.
Defensio was the solution I chose on Drupal so when I installed WordPress I decided to go with it for my WordPress blog too. It turned out to be a very easy install, you basically just sign up for an account with them, then install the WordPress plug-in. Once that is done Defensio reviews all your comments and gives them a “spammy” value.
What I like about Defensio is that it is an adaptive filter that learns what is spam based on input from you, or other content administrators on your site. The more input your give it the better it becomes. Even on a small blog like mine where I have only had a few comments I still get nearly one hundred spam comments a week, and so far Defensio has caught all of them with zero false positives.
For a site with heavier usage I would guess that solution would workout even better, because the more input you give Defensio the better it can identify what is spam and what is a valid comment.
It is still early days, I have only been using it for a couple of months, but so far I am quite impressed with it.
Defensio uses a pretty simple API and seems to have plug-ins for many blogs and forum packages.
Tags: Spam, Web Development
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