But, I’ve found the combination of Akismet and TanTan’s Simple Spam Filter plugin to be extremely effective. Here’s my Akismet spam history graph. See if you can tell when I activated Simple Spam Filter…

November 13, 2008.

The graph doesn’t show spam that got published, only spam that Akismet had to nuke. The number of spamments that were successful is quite minimal.

With the two working together, the amount of spam that actually gets through to be (temporarily) published on my blog is almost zero. Maybe one or two per day (sometimes slightly higher, sometimes none at all).

The current version of the Akismet plugin for WordPress installs just fine in the mu-plugins directory, meaning each blog automatically gets protected, without any configuration or setup. The Akismet key can be hardcoded into the plugin file, and when that is done, all configuration interface magically disappears from the wp-admin interface. Easy peasy.

All that was required by Akismet was that I provide a link from each blog to Akismet.com to give credit for the spam protection. I wrote up a VERY simple mu-plugin to automatically insert the text and link in the footer of each blog on UCalgaryBlogs.ca.

I’m curious to see how well Akismet functions on some of the topics of conversation – some post colonial courses commonly use language that trips up word filters pretty readily…

And, yeah. I hit the “Spam” button to file this in /dev/null even if the guy was honest(ish). I’m assuming he just ripped the text out of Wikipedia or something, and used it without proper linktribution…

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…

Shortly after switching to Akismet, and enabling the experimental spam detection, I was seeing this:

Now, that might not look like much, but it suggests that Akismet was having to reject attempts several times per minute. Fast forward 24 hours, and I see this:

Again, not looking like much, but the interval between Akismet interventions is getting longer. Either the spammers are slowly starting to give up, or this is just a natural lull. I mean, there can be several minutes now without an attempted spamment posting. Entire minutes!

Now, the downside of Akismet is that I can’t use it on any of my campus projects. The cost of licensing Akismet for the number of sites we have would be prohibitive, given our budget asymptotically approaching zero dollars (CDN).

So, here's the latest. I got frustrated with the number of spamments that snuck through the combo of Bad Behavior and Spam.module, so I disabled both. I've reverted to using only Akismet.module, with the experimental spambot detection/prevention enabled.

And, so far, it's doing a better job at blocking the roaches. I've got no idea if it's also blocking legitimate hu-mans, though.

One nice thing about Akismet.module vs. spam.module – with Akismet's experimental spambot prevention, it's closer to acting like Spam Karma 2, where if you smell like a roach, you don't even get close enough to pop the lid off your can of spray paint.

I'll have to look into updating Akismet.module for Drupal 5. There's really no sense in actually moving to D5 without spam blocking. That'd be kind of silly.

As an aside, I was looking through some of the logs, and found an interesting user agent, which led me to the product website for one of the evil spam roach comment bot factory applications. They have disclaimers on the site saying they don't condone using their product without the permission of the blog owners. What? Permission? What a frakking load of ass-covering crap that is. Yeah. You're going to give someone permission to aim a program titled "Blog Post Uzi" – because, you know, Uzis are all warm and fuzzy, and the kind of thing that friends give permission to other friends to point at each other. Yeah. Permission to spray the output of a concealable assault gun. Whatever. Karma's going to catch up to you in spades, my friends at Promo Arsenal (dot com).

A Spammer Responds (screenshot): This spam roach was trying to get whitelisted by commiserating on the evils of spammers… It didn't work – Akismet sniffed it a mile away.

So, without thinking, I clicked "submit ham" – to tell Akismet that it was a bona fide comment. Then, I checked the URL to see which friendly blogger was commenting.

And got a spam site.

The spammer was trying to get through the filters by reading my recent post and trying to get whitelisted by posting something not spamish at first glance. But, Akismet had stopped him in his tracks – until I clumsily intervened. It's now re-flagged as Spam, and banished to that special inner circle of hell reserved for these roaches.