When you read about anti-spam problems like this with no recourse
, it means the spammers are winning. Akismet is platform-agnostic, and it already works great for all self-hosted systems, why shouldn’t it be available to people on Typepad? (Or Blogger.) If the folks on Fourth street don’t want to pay for an Akismet site license (though I’m sure we could work out a discount for their volume) they could just make it an option for users to specify an API endpoint, like a ping server address. This would also open up the market to anti-spam services besides Akismet, since anyone could clone the API if they wanted.
It definitely does seem like a logical addition to allow a similar functionality on something of that volume, particularly with the volume of spam being dealt currently. Perhaps they see it as a sign of weakness to outsource to other companies for solutions such as Askimet?
It’d definitely be a good step though. If only it were considered to be worth it by those in charge..
It’s a waste of time for startups to re-invent solutions to problems that have been solved elsewhere better than they ever could in-house.
It’s silly for anti-spam to be a differentiator between one blogging product and another, which is why I made Akismet an open API and it’s used by numerous “competitors” to WordPress. When someone stops blogging because of spam it hurts us all as an industry, especially when spam is growing faster than any of us are.
Matt,
Good post, dead on — it’s the same reason we opened up phishtank.com for anyone who wants anti-phishing data for integration into their application. There’s a better business to be made in making the internet actually work better, not just selling “security” crap. 🙂
Do you know of any folks (publicly) using Akismet for non-blog-spam reputation or classification systems?
It’s being used for a lot of things besides blogs — especially contact forms, signups, guestbooks, forums, wikis, etc — but I don’t know if anything is explicitly tying it to a reputation or classification system. I’m not even sure I’m sure what that means. 🙂
Matt- I think if you made the process a little easier for people to sign up it you would sell more licenses. I would buy a license in a second if the process was easier instead for me if its more then a 2-3 step process (I traded emails with someone atleast 3 times) I just give up and move on.
You have a great product try not to get frustrated.
I just implemented Akismet on my Django-powered blog. It’s great! I don’t know how you do that voodoo that you do so well, but I’m sure glad you found a way.
Matt,
A reputation system is sort of like a whitelist, as opposed to something else like a blacklist or decision engine (like Akismet or bayesian filtering engines, etc).
With Akismet, over time, I imagine you get a pretty good idea of what a good post looks like and what a bad post looks like. That probably helps you decide what is spam and what isn’t spam. That’s why Akismet rocks and blocks lots of blog spam.
BUT, if you had the IP address of the comment submitter, you would start to get an idea that some IPs are good and some are bad. Sure, proxies would get lumped in the bad column, but you’d have a sort of reputation system of IP addresses.
This is important because an IP address that does blog spam might be likely to participate in a DoS attack or send out email spam because it is some compromised windows machine (or linux webserver, or whatever).
I spend a lot of time correlating datasets and I think it’d be interesting to start correlating some of this. I’ll follow up with you offline if this kind of thing is interesting to you…
Happy New Year,
David Ulevitch