Switching from Spam Karma 2 to Akismet
Posted by: dnorman in general, tags: akismet, spam, spam karma 2My blog has been receiving spam in what looks to be a new wave of spam attacks. First, the spammers seed the whitelist by posting apparently innocuous comments with no URLs, or with a URL that doesn’t contain spam. Then, once they’re in, they wait a bit and then throw the switch. The spam starts a’comin’ and it sneaks through Spam Karma 2. Very annoying.
One thing I really like about SK2 is that it is standalone - it doesn’t rely on any network connection or other systems to flag stuff as spam. It just tracks IP addresses, user agents, and sniffs the content and URL for attempted comments.
But, that might be its weak point as well - by not harnessing the power of The Cloud, it’s more vulnerable to these kinds of guerrilla spam insurgencies. Once someone using Akismet has flagged someone as an evil spammer, everyone automattically benefits from that, without having to each individually flag the spammass as a jerkwad.
SK2 has served me well for quite some time. Here’s the current stats report:
Over 200,000 spams dealt with. But the number of moderations required is getting inconvenient - not impossible, but it’s becoming something I need to manage rather than just fire-and-forget, the way things used to be.
Now, with Akismet enabled instead, I’m at the mercy of The Cloud, but that might not be a bad thing…
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D’Arcy,
Dr. Dave has said he’s tossing in the towel soon on Spam Karma- he’s tired of keeping up with the code base changes.
I’ve found that SpamKarma stopped more Spam than Akismet- and had a lot less moderation issues.
But, it seems all of us will have to make the switch soon.
Keep us up to date on how it’s working for you.
@david: so far, I’m pretty unimpressed with Akismet. Of the 3 comments posted to my blog since the switch, I had to moderate all of them - 2 were pushed into manual moderation, and yours was flagged as full-on spam. Not cool, Akismet. So far, the moderation load is higher than it was under SK2, and the false positive has me nervous…
D’Arcy-
that was the same experience I had. I think that the Spam bots actually find the akismet blogs faster than the SpamKarma ones-
and the funny thing- some they don’t find at all.
Last time I tried Akismet- I had to switch back in less than a week- totally ineffective.
Keep us informed. What’s this “You’re being watched. Disable” thing on the comment form?
Sigh, was excited when I read the post in the reader, and now I hear Askimet is less shiny. I was considering the same switch, as SK2 pretty much requires a fair amount of moderating. I have been using Askiment on a few less visited NMC Wp sites and it seems to run fairly well there, but I gather they are low target blogs.
Spammers seem to be maintaining the upper hand. Damn you roaches. Damn you Google for providing all of the incentive to feed spammers and doing *****ing nothing to help the little bloggers deal with it. Damn you, damn you, damn you Google. With all that dough and brainpower I cannot believe you can fail to help. Damn you Google.
@david: it flagged you as spam again. dangit! wtf, akismet? or are you busy spamming other blogs
At this rate, I don’t trust Akismet, which is far worse than having to moderate a few comments each day. I’ll give it a week to smarten up, then it’s back to SK2. If only I had the opportunity to talk with the Automattic team in person. Oh, wait. They’ll be at Northern Voice. I’ll be sure to raise this… 
@alan: yeah. fracking spammers. Google needs a big fat “report a url as spam” that lets people submit a suspected spam site to be checked out. Can’t be automatic - that would cause narc wars - but it could put all click-payments to be put into an escrow-like account so the suspected spammers don’t see a cent until a Google rep has greenlighted their url(s). easy fix. it would just take money. if only Google had access to some of that…
@david: almost forgot. the “you are being watched” thing is from the Voyeur plugin for wordpress. It adds yet another set of stats to obsess over, this time tracking people who have commented and when they’ve come back to visit. Kind of interesting (actually, very interesting) but a little creepy. I’m trying to hit the “disable” button, but haven’t been able to pull the trigger yet…
Info on Blog Voyeur: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/blog-voyeur/
I don’t spam other blogs- but, I have been following up every post about me in my election.
I didn’t have very good luck with akismet- same sort of behavior.
Google could easily solve this problem- by shutting scraper sites and every other site on the host machine out. It would end spam comments in about a day. Please do talk to auttomatic- and ask them to make peace with Dr. Dave and try his route- much more effective.
@david: you’re 3 for 3 under Akismet. That last one was flagged as spam as well. I’m going to see if there’s a way to let them know about that asap.
I’m only about 175,000 spams blocked, but I am using Spam Karma *and* Akismet with fair success. very few false positives… though I am still surprised at some of the things it puts in moderation that are so obviously spam!
Google’s shown very little interest in trying to deal with the problem. Philosophically, I can understand why, even if I don’t agree with it. The one thing they DID do (the nofollow tag) is a disaster, killing off as much good credit as bad…
@chris: the last time I tried mixing Akismet with anything else, the non-akismet spamcop wound up feeding false negatives back to Akismet and I got blacklisted or something. I talked with Matt and it got cleared up, but it’s left me a bit leery about mixing the dark arts.
I don’t know, guess I have good mojo. The combination seems to be relatively common. I think there is some kind of plugin to feed Spam Karma caught spam to Akismet, which makes me suspect that in the ordinary run of things that doesn’t happen at all. But your mileage may vary.
Today’s the day. No more SK2. 7/16/2008 SK2 RIP
While Dr. Dave said he was giving up SK- he gave it up to the community- to see what others do with it.
http://unknowngenius.com/blog/archives/2008/07/14/spam-karma-is-gpl/
SK still works just fine.
I totally agree with Dave that Akismet doesn’t seem to make sense: “As for WP coming bundled with its own anti-spam plugin, I could also go on for hours on that. The fact that a community-based open-source project is used to distribute a commercially licensed piece of software doesn’t make me particularly happy.”