The collaborative comment spam filtering database Akismet has drastically improved the game for me over the past few months, but until recently, it worked only with WordPress. Just days after I switched from MovableType to WP, I was contacted to help with a secret beta test of a version of Akismet for MT. Since I could no longer run that test on this blog, I deployed it on John Battelle’s Searchblog and Mary Hodder’s Napsterization, two of Birdhouse’s hardest-hit installations. After identifying some bugs and an initial rocky start, the plugin started kicking some serious butt.
Today Akismet/MT went public — ironically at the same time some independent coders developed their own versions. So far, the only thing that seems to hang it up are scoring conflicts with other installed systems. For example, if you have MT set to score +1 for a comment containing less than three links, but Akismet flags a comment as spam and ranks it -1, the two scores cancel each other out. But those are minor bumps.
Unfortunately Akismet isn’t quite the true golden egg in terms of reducing server load, though it does help. My comments on that topic here.
Spammers listen up: There are a whole lot more of us than there are of you, and it’s really hard to imagine you figuring out how to game this system. You don’t stand a chance.
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It’d be nice if they documented somewhere what to do about these “speedbumps”. I can’t see any documentation specific to MT.
Yeah, the documentation is kind of weak. My recommendation would be to try it with all other spam mechanisms disabled first, and maybe moderation enabled. The MT version doesn’t seem to catch quite as much as the WP version – I think because the signatures look different to the database, so it needs time to get smarter. I ultimately turned moderation off on this blog and am using Akismet only.