Akismet

If you’re curious about some techniques of spammers and the intersection between economics and spam, check out this talk by Ross Anderson at Google:

We had a 40 minute downtime in our San Antonio location last night. This probably caused some obvious spam on your blog to be missed by Akismet.

We’re obviously looking on the systems side at what happened and how to prevent it, but also on the client side we’d like to make the WP plugin deal more gracefully with not being able to contact the mothership.

Kristof Coomans (who has the shortest email address I’ve ever seen, 8 characters) wrote in to tell us that there is now an Akismet plugin for the EZ Publish content management system.

Spam is growing.

From 0 to 1,000,000: 70 days

From 1,000,000 to 100,000,000: 190 days

100,000,000 to 1,000,000,000: 257 days

1 billion to 2 billion: 108 days

It’s funny how fast that last billion went. To celebrate we made a new chart showing total spam blocked over time.

Scott Hemmeter wrote in to tell us that many web forms across the web feed into Salesforce.com so people can track the responses and such from them. Like any other form on the web these get spammed to death. Scott has cooked up a solution, combining Akismet and Salesforce to combat spam:

Read the rest and download the script.

Remember Postnuke? They now have an Akismet module, which when used with EZComments gives you all the Akismet goodness you’ve come to expect.

Paul Benetis found something interesting on his blog:

That in and of itself isn’t terribly unusual, there are a thousand things that can cause a blog to be slow, but check out what Paul found:

You can read the whole story on his blog. Thanks for sharing Paul!

MyBulletinBoard now has an Akismet mod. I think the non-blog implementations of WordPress now outnumber the blog ones, it’s obvious that web spam is a very prevalent problem and I’m excited about all this new data coming from so many sources.

tDiary is a blog tool famous in Japan, which should become more famous now that Tadashi Tada has developed an Akismet library for it.

Simone Carletti from Italy wrote it that the “Zend Framework Core Team has reviewed and approved Zend_Service_Akismet proposal.”

“The initial revision has been moved to Incubator, this means that probably it will be available with the next ZF release.”

That’s great news, thanks for the note Simone.