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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Entries (RSS)
I’m gonna give this one a shot, so far as you say akismet has been really good but I’m getting a bit tired of looking for false positives. Hopefully defensio will give me less work
Defensio sounds Italian. If anyone can stop spam it is the Mafia. You spamma my computer I breaka you face.
You know what they say: you keep trying to make things idiot proof (read spam-proof) but they keep making better idiots
spam is inevitable
[...] Jon Lee: Defensio out of Private Beta! [...]
As for me, still prefer using the plug in based.
It is easy and so far has done a good job for my little xBrain’s blog
Looks promising Jon. The Defensio website is pretty nicely done as well. Kudos to you!
I find Spam Karma works well for me, but it’s good to see alternatives.
Spams are must one the net. but it is good to have some new alternative to protect spams. then there will be more powerful spams and also guards. we will also use them. in this way things will contunue. ha ha ha…
Dang that is pretty cool. I actually stopped using askimet because it block so many comments that were legit. I will have to check this new plugin out.
Nice to see new spam programs coming out. I might try this one soon.
as WP user, I would say wow, it actually bring us a new option rather just use akimset all the time, which is sometimes pass the spammers in..
Good to see some new spam programs.. I racon it s going to work in the future
I think there’ll be a program in the future that will be able to be used my email marketing users, that will send marketing mail to just the target market from a recorded study of their internet surfing, hence recognition of their interests. Therefore it will streamline marketing channels and decrease the receipt of spam, as it will be mostly delivered to people who have interest in that specific product or topic. Well that’s just my weird mind going wild again. But the above software is quite great hey.
Pretty neat, thanks for giving us the heads up. Good work guys, keep it up.
Justin