Defensio out of Private Beta!
Posted by Jon Lee in Web Development, tags: comments, Defensio, plug-ins, spam, wordpress
The spam protection program I’ve been raving about so much is now out of private beta — anyone can now sign-up!
How Defensio is different from Akismet
For many people, Akismet works very well — it doesn’t ever let a single spam comment through. However the problem is with false-positives. That is, legitimate comments that get flagged as spam. Although many spam management programs let the user go through and find falsely classified comments, none of them make the task as easy (or as fun) as Defensio. When you view your quarantine (caught spam comments), all comments are sorted by a spaminess rating so it makes it easy to find the few false positives amongst thousands of spam comments.
When moderating these comments, they are automatically truncated to the first line so you can see more of them at once. Finally, once a false positive is found, it uses a bit of AJAX to recover the comment complete with fade effect.
New Features
With the release of the public beta comes a few new features, most notably the statistics section that can now be accessed through the Defensio site. You now have the ability to track the accuracy, volume of spam, and volume of legitimate comments over the entire time you’ve had Defensio installed. As you can see from my graph, spam has been pretty consistent over the past couple months.
Another interesting new feature is the addition of an RSS feed for both spam and legitimate comments. This gives you the option of following comments through an RSS reader instead of checking your quarantine or blog directly.
Not Just for WordPress
Defensio is not just for WordPress (although their WP plugin is very easy to install and use). Defensio can be used for any system that has some sort of commenting. Thinking of creating a new web app? You can use Defensio for your spam filtering needs!
So go ahead and try it out for a few days and see what you think!
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