Category Archives: Akismet

The spam-fighting service protecting millions of sites.

Time Zones

Akismet, Audrey, Personal, Software

If you like rabbit holes, a wonderful way to spend your Sunday is in the writing of Zach Holman, an early engineer at Github and Gitlab.

All are good, but a particular favorite of mine is UTC is enough for everyone …right? You don’t need to code to appreciate that time is a construct, that has evolved over time. “At noon in DC, it was 12:08 in Philly.” Time zones introduce particular complexity because, besides obvious things like Daylight Saving Time starting and stopping at different times at different places in history and geography. If you do write code, you’ve probably come across things like Epoch Time.

The Unix epoch (or Unix time or POSIX time or Unix timestamp) is the number of seconds that have elapsed since January 1, 1970 (midnight UTC/GMT), not counting leap seconds (in ISO 8601: 1970-01-01T00:00:00Z). Literally speaking, the epoch is Unix time 0 (midnight 1/1/1970), but ‘epoch’ is often used as a synonym for Unix time. Some systems store epoch dates as a signed 32-bit integer, which might cause problems on January 19, 2038 (known as the Year 2038 problem or Y2038).

I’ve spent far too many hours on the PHP date manual page and the related comments (now gone! I used to have a few, they probably retired because they were on earlier versions of the language).

As a bit of lore for Zach he might appreciate, I’ll share that when writing some of the first logging and data processing systems for Akismet, I divided the files using Swatch Internet Time to give me a consistent balance of dividing a day, but still doing things as real-time as possible. The anti-spam learning system would update about every 86 seconds.

Today Akismet blocked its 100 billionth spam. 100,000,000,000. Billion with a B. We had to tweak the counter on the homepage to handle more numbers.

Dear WordPress,

Akismet, WordPress

Has it really been 10 years? It seems just yesterday we were playing around on my blog, and the blogs of a few high school friends. Two of those friends are married, one isn’t anymore, two are still figuring things out, and one has passed away.

You were cute before you became beautiful. Wearing black and white, afraid of color, trying to be so unassuming. I know you got jealous when I wore those Blogger t-shirts. They were the cool kids at SxSW and I thought maybe you could grow up to be like them.

You wouldn’t have shirts of your own for a few more years. We didn’t know what we were doing when we made them and the logo printed ginormous. People called them the Superman shirt and made fun of them. But, oh, that logo — the curves fit you so well.

You showed the world you were growing up, and how much you cared about design and typography and other platonic ideals. You knew that open source didn’t have to be homely. I stretched myself too thin trying to get you there, and I did a stupid thing to pay for it. I hurt you, but instead of casting me away you held me closer, supported me, gave me another chance. I will never forget that. Akismet made me feel less guilty. I wouldn’t change anything, because the mistake made me understand how important it is to fly straight and take your time.

You’re so beautiful… I’m continually amazed and delighted by how you’ve grown. Your awkward years are behind you. Best of all, through it all, you’ve stuck with the principles that got you started in the first place. You’re always changing but that never changes. You’re unafraid to try new things that may seem wacky or unpopular at first.

I see you all over the world now, glowing from screens, bringing people together at meetups and WordCamps — you’re at your best when you do that. You’re my muse; you inspire me, and I’ve seen you inspire others. You become a part of their life and they become a part of yours. I hope we grow old together.

Cheers to ten years, and here’s to a hundred more.

Love,
Matt

On Yahoo-Tumblr

Akismet, WordPress.com, Yahoo

It now looks pretty certain that Yahoo has pulled off a deal to buy Tumblr for 1.1B. The relationship between WordPress and Tumblr has always been pretty friendly: Tumblr’s own blog used to be on WP, WordPress.com supports Tumblr as a Publicize option alongside Twitter and Facebook, our Akismet team sends them daily emails of splogs on the service, and there’s healthy import and export traffic both ways. (Imports have actually spiked on the rumors even though it’s Sunday: normally we import 400-600 posts an hour from Tumblr, last hour it was over 72,000.)

News like this, whether from a friend or a competitor, is always bittersweet: I’m curious to see what the creative folks behind Tumblr do with their new resources, both personal and corporate, but I’m more interested to know what they would have done over the next 5-10 years as an independent company. I think we’re at the cusp of understanding the ultimate value of web publishing platforms, particularly ones that work cross-domain, and while Yahoo’s all-cash deal by some metrics, like revenue, is very generous, I think it’s a tenth of the value that will be created in these platforms over the coming years.

Update: Some people are reading too much into the import numbers — I don’t think there will be an exodus from Tumblr. For more color read the comments on this post.

TechCrunch writes WordPress.com Has Imported 15M Posts In The Last 30 Days, Remains A Top Safe Haven For Nomad Bloggers. I’m very proud of the 8+ years we’ve been a home for, and protected, our users blogs. Protection covers many aspects: backups, scalability, security, speed, permalinks, mobile versions, forward-compatible markup, clean exports… the list goes on. We’ve done the same with other internet-scale services, like Akismet, Gravatar, and Jetpack, and I hope to earn the same trust in the coming decade with VaultPress and Simperium.

Being blocked on your own blog

Akismet, Spam

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.

On PayPerPost

Akismet, Video

So I signed up for PayPerPost is Toni’s foray into the seedy side of paid blogging. Includes some interesting comments, including an ultra-defensive thread from one of their investors. I also came across a ton of creepy videos on Youtube, a lovefest for PayPerPost and apparently those are $10 a pop. There is a firm that does something similar in real life, Buzz agents or something, but they’re actually fairly respectable simply because they require one thing: the agents to say that they’re being paid. End of story. I have no problem with bloggers making money, but that info out there and let people make up their own mind.

Another way to think about it: If PayPerPost was PayPerComment instead, and they paid people to leave comments shilling various products or services, what would you call it? What if they paid people to email their friends about something without disclosure? Would someone start an anti-PayPerPost Akismet, or a Firefox extension to detect and highlight people using them?

Spam + Blogs = Trouble

Akismet, Spam

Wired had an article out last month called Spam + Blogs = Trouble where I share some of my perspectives on the whole spam thing. It’s a good article, but I strongly disagree with Anil’s comments at the end around a global identifier or “Internet Social Security number.” Akismet has shown we don’t need to boil the ocean or make commenters jump through hoops to get effective spam protection on blogs (and blog hosting services).

Paid Support

Akismet, Automattic, WordPress

We just launched the Automattic Support Network which is a place for companies to purchase paid support for WordPress and MU. Originally I didn't think we'd need to do this, simply because the WordPress.org support forums are so amazing and there is such a good community around it. That hasn't changed, but some big companies and enterprise folks are uncomfortable with volunteer support, and want (and insist) on paying someone before deploying a product. Based on that feedback and a lot of input from Podz, we put together this new product, which is basically VIP support with a guaranteed response time. Toni has some more thoughts here. We also rolled out new pricing for commercial Akismet use a few days ago, and the response has been great so far.

CNET Buzz Out Loud

Akismet, Press, WordPress

Thanks to Michael Pate and Josh Jarmin who wrote in about Akismet and WordPress being mentioned on CNET’s Buzz Out Loud podcast on 4/26, I got in contact with the Buzz folks and they invited me in to the studio today for a brief chat. (I still live a block away from CNET.) Molly Wood and Veronica Belmont were fantastic hosts and hopefully Molly can get her firewall sorted out. It should be up on their site later today. Update: I snapped two photos to Flickr during the podcast.