More Defensio + Mephisto Administrative Goodness
Why should you switch to Defensio instead of Akismet ? Because of this:
Defensio provides useful statistics to the blogger. A typical response would look like:
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--- defensio-result: message: "" status: success signature: awnc057e1a132p1jj3t4x spaminess: 0.7 api-version: "1.1" spam: true |
Notice how Defensio returned the spaminess and a signature ? The signature can be used to retrain Defensio. When a false positive or negative comes through, the Defensio API simply accepts a series of signatures, and will retrain itself. Since the signature is a short-hand for the whole comment, all of the data is available for retraining: IP, author email, author name, comment’s body, etc.
It is not obvious from the screenshot above (as I mostly get spammy comments), but there are actually many shades of orange to highlight the spaminess of comments. Lighter shades are non-spammy, and darker ones, spammier.
March 4th, 2008 at 05:12 PM
I removed most of my Mephisto spam comments on blog.caboo.se with my “I am a human” checkbox. Stupid, but it works. Check out the source for another secret!
I should send that patch in, it’s incredibly useful.
March 5th, 2008 at 03:35 PM
I did something even simpler: I made the email text field hidden (via javascript). Humans will not see it and therefore not input anything. Bots will see it and try to fill in.
I don’t see any point on leaving emails in the comments anyway. It only serves as an easy way for bots to read them and add them to spam lists anyway.
Simple and doesn’t need the user to fill in yet another non-sense question box.
March 6th, 2008 at 11:28 AM
is it faster than Akismet? That’s been my big issue with it, it takes quite a while sometimes to get a response.