I took a rare look at the dashboard of my WordPress blog and saw that Matt Mullenweg was looking for beta testers for a new spam blocking tool. I was getting hammered by spammers and they were driving me mad so I emailed him and found myself accepted.
Akismet is the end result of that beta testing – and it’s awesome. I’m actually getting less spam as a result at the spammers can see that their efforts are going nowhere! Phew.
The persistent guys still hang around but to date, touch wood, I’ve had no false positives and only a few have slipped through. Because Akismet is collaborative and intelligent it learns from experience and those gains are passed to the entire community.
Yes it means my blog is connecting to a webservice and that means it may be slower but I comment on my own blog and I don’t see any problems at all. Certainly I’m noticing severe problems with the ping services so I’m hoping that because Akismet has a commercial element that the funds will flow to allow it to keep pace with demand. Lucky WordPress.com users get Akismet as a standard feature of their blog.
In the mean time, Matt, thank you so much for putting this in place. There will be me-too systems developed and that’s great too. But you were first.
You just have to wonder if Akismet should be pronounced “Ah Kiss Matt” in a sexy southern drawl (as interpreted by a kiwi :))
Thanks for the info on this!
Yes, it is. We use it on our site as well. It’s been nice to be working so closely with Matt (via IRC and the web dev. team) to see it progress this far and come to a point of production. Good plans for WordPress 2.0 as well, keep a close eye out for it!
Incredible. Yesterday Akismet blocked over 239,000 spams. That’s alot of busy little spammers out there practising their trade.
I’ve certainly noticed a few getting through, and I’m not sure if that’s the service timing out or new, sneaky spam finding ways around it. Either way it won’t last long because WordPress helps you manage comments really easily anyway 🙂
Akismet is getting hammered these days so I’ve just installed Bad Behaviour over the top to ease the load. Within minutes it had foiled 3 bits of spam!
Any updates on this, how is Bad behaviour working ?
Bad Behaviour is brilliant… although I tried to add it to my directory and it seemed to go nuts, but I should try again 🙂
From my stats…
Bad Behavior has blocked 1586 access attempts in the last 7 days.
That’s 1586 bits of spam that haven’t had to go into the Akismet system or be manually rejected by me.