Defensio: Outsmarting Evil Spam

It’s been almost 2 weeks since we launched and we received tons of amazing press (see the sidebar). All this wouldn’t be have been possible without the help of our testers from our alpha, private beta and public beta. Thanks to all!

But more specifically, I want to thank our first 2 testers: Ben Yoskovitz and Julien Smith. They’ve been awesome at providing constructive feedback and helping us improve Defensio. Without them, I don’t think Defensio would even exist today (really).

Not only they’re 2 great guys, but they also maintain top notch blogs: Ben’s Instigator Blog is geared towards business, technology and startups. Julien’s In Over Your Head is about technology, podcasting, music and life in general. Both are recommended additions to your RSS reader.

Cheers to our testers! We really appreciate your help.

(and for the record, we’re still in public beta and we need more testers!)

We are very charged up today to announce the much-anticipated (by us, at least!) public-beta launch of Defensio’s new spam filtering web service for blogs (and other social web applications subject to spam).

If you’re a blogger, you are likely already intimately familiar with the “spam problem”. Spammers have been waging war on the blogosphere for months now, bombarding the comments section of blogs with literally millions of spam messages per day. This creates a lot of work for blog owners, who have to wade through hundreds if not thousands of messages every week, just to make sure their comment garden remains weed-free. It’s become such a problem that many simply don’t bother anymore, preferring to let the odd legitimate comment disappear; and an increasing number of bloggers are even opting to shut down comments altogether — an unfortunate, and unnecessary, concession to the cold-hearted spammers’ cause.

We felt that the time was ripe for a better spam management solution; so we built Defensio.

But with other web-based anti-spam services out there, what makes Defensio so special? Well, let us count the ways:

Ridiculously easy spam management:

Defensio sorts your quarantined comments by their “spaminess” value. This means that finding the occasional legitimate comment buried in your spambox (aka false positive) becomes dead easy, by bubbling up to the top of the list. We think this feature alone will make you never want to go back to old chronological spam sorting ever again.

RSS feeds of your comments and spam:

Defensio provides RSS feeds of all comments and spam messages posted to your blog, in digest form, to make it a cinch to follow the conversation. And what’s best is that since it’s Defensio, new spam messages will always be spaminess-sorted, making it ultra easy to pick out the good stuff.

Detailed statistics for complete transparency:

We believe in letting you in on how Defensio is performing on your own blog; it’s your traffic after all! You’ll get up-to-date accuracy and traffic statistics directly in the plug-in, as well as gorgeous charts to help you monitor the evolution of spam and performance over time.

Stellar accuracy:

Defensio is coldly efficient in stopping spam. What’s best is that our filter’s performance is personalized to your own blog, and continues to improve over time. And since we’re up-front about performance statistics you can see for yourself just how we’re doing, which, after an initial learning phase should hover well above 99% accuracy. Not bad, we think!

Not just for blogs:

Defensio’s spam fighting abilities don’t end with the blogosphere. We’ve built an easy-to-use public API that is perfectly suited to handling comment traffic from any social web application that might be subject to spam. Already, generous community developers have contributed plug-ins for PixelPost, Ruby on Rails and .NET. So, if you’re a developer, check out our API and get a-buildin’.

Want to achieve stress-free spam-free nirvana on your blog? It’s super easy to get started! Simply sign-up for an account and then download and install a plug-in. We are currently supporting WordPress 2.1+, PixelPost 1.7+ and Umbraco, with more platforms coming online soon. And the best part is that Defensio is 100% free for personal use; it’s hard not to like that!

Please browse around our shiny new web site, and let us know if you have any questions — we’ve set up a community forum to hear what you have to say, and we’ll be monitoring it closely. Finally, we encourage you to sign up for this blog’s RSS feed so that you can stay up to date with all the latest news and developments, Defensio-style.

See you on the other side of spam.

The Defensio story begins not-so-long ago with our team looking at the web ecosystem and thinking about those nagging problems that have yet to be satisfactorily resolved. One of the first and most annoying that jumped to mind was spam. As we all know, spam is a scourge that mercilessly plagues our e-mail inboxes. But spam has also crept up on us in the blogosphere: slowly at first, and then exponentially of late, comment spam has begun, much to our collective chagrin, to inundate our blogs like a tidal wave of smelly, post-processed meat sledge.

Vowing to take on the multi-headed beast that is blog spam, the Defensio team set up shop in an old tobacco factory outside of Montreal, plugged in our laptops to large monitors, and started writing spam-shredding Ruby on Rails code. And because no Silicon Valley Eastern-Township startup would be complete without free pop and nerdy games of skill, we rounded out the office space with a fridge and a ping-pong table.

[ . . . time passes, much diet pepsi and pizza is consumed . . .]

After months of R&D, the Defensio blog spam filter was nearing launch-ready state. Encouraging results on our internal testbed prompted us to solicit a few brave local souls (infinite thanks to Julien, Ben and Pat) to run our alpha code on their very own blogs. As we worked out the kinks in the code, we realized that our newborn nameless app urgently needed to be christened with a brand that screamed “spam’s worst nightmare”. Many brainstorming sessions and many terrible candidate names later (mZego anyone?) our shiny new monicker came to light: DEFENSIO. Strong. Dependable. Spam-aint-gettin-through. Perfect? Yes, but one problem: the domain name was in that murky state known as “redemption period”.

We can admit to some sleepless nights as we watched the domain status incessantly. Being the uber-geeks that we are, we wrote a script that polled the WHOIS server every hour and would notify us of a change in state. Eventually, the name became poised for deletion, but it would not be ours until we were dragged into the slimy, wet mud of a bidding war with a shadowy character named ‘halvarez’, who had a reputation for sniping domain names at the very last second - a formidable opponent, to say the least. Fortunately though, our steely nerves saw us through this online game of chicken, and we prevailed, defensio.com in hand.

Which brings us to the present. Our web-service is now nearing launch ready state, already smoking many thousands of spam comments every day, under the Defensio banner we all so love.

Yet, this is but the beginning of what is sure to be a long, protracted war. As spammers don’t sleep, nor will we.