Ma.gnolia Uses Akismet

Social bookmarking service Ma.gnolia has integrated Akismet to help their battle against spam.

2 thoughts on “Ma.gnolia Uses Akismet

  1. As Akismet was originally crafted for comment spam, and then proven good for forum spam, and now likely for social bookmarking, I would love to hear if there are any interesting differences between these three?

    I am not surprised by this development considering Ma.gnolia are clients of Citizen Agency and grok Chris Messina’s fantastic insights.

  2. I can’t speak for the differences between the comment-forum-sb application of Akismet, but I can give an overview of how the experience was for us.

    First, integration was quite smooth, made possible with some advice from Matt.

    We ran Akismet in parallel with our existing spam control, comparing the output, and after a few weeks of training the system we put it into production. Monitoring the production output is very important. At first we found that Akismet would react conservatively, then swing to being more aggressive, over the course of a few days. After a month of periodic training by correction (both ways, by showing real spam and correcting false positives), we’ve found Akismet to have settled into a happy space. I haven’t made more than two or three corrections in the last two weeks.

    Akismet has helped us immensely. We treat it as an assisting tool, not as an out-of-mind solution. We keep watching the output from Akismet, ready to make corrections, even if they are only needed once in a while.

    We’re encouraging other social bookmarking services that are dealing with spam to take a look at our experience, and to get in touch with us if they have questions. It’s not a competitive advantage to have a good spam solution as it is an imperative for anyone running a service that depends on a healthy internet. We’ll post the field mapping to our wiki sometime soon (note to self, do that thing you just said).

    Matt and everyone else working on Akismet, thank you from everyone at Ma.gnolia. What a great technology.

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