Defensio: Outsmarting Evil Spam

As some of you might know, our friends at Automattic are planning to release version 2.5 of WordPress today.   We’ve been getting a lot of emails about compatibility with the Defensio plugin.

At this moment, our plugin is not yet 100% compatible with WP 2.5.  We have already started making the needed adjustments and we expect to release an update in the next few days.   It might be wise to wait a couple of days before upgrading to 2.5.

We’ll keep you posted here.

Last night, Carl and I had the opportunity to present a short demo of the Defensio spam filtering service at DemocampMontreal3. It was fun, and we received a lot of great feedback from the local community.

Best of all were some of the discussion questions that came at the end of the presentation. For the benefit of all you who were too busy to attend (what could be more important than Democamp!?) or not in Montreal (we’ll forgive you for that) I’d like to run through some of the more important questions that were asked, and our silky-smooth responses:

Q: Some bloggers have turned off comments because of spam, others have turned off comments due to a philosophical belief, espoused by Dave Winer, Joel Spolsky (among others), that comments should not actually be part of the blogosphere. Where do you stand on this?

A: Well, we vehemently believe that comments should be part of the conversation on the Web, for many reasons:

• Comment threads, while sometimes childish and petty, are more often valuable sources of insight beyond the original blog post.
• Commenting on your own blog in response to another post, is often not the right venue - especially for short comments — and would often be completely out of context for your blog’s readership.
• Allowing only trackbacks does not immunize you from spam — in fact, much of the worst comment spam is in pingback/trackback form.

Most importantly, we think closing comments generally dampens conversation, which is fundamentally bad for freedom of expression and the overall thought exchange process that blogs are so wonderful at enabling.

Q: How quickly will your filter learn?

A: We can’t provide precise numbers, but we can say that filter performance will continue to improve over time and that respectable results should be seen after a week or two of use.

Q: Isn’t spam only a problem for the largest blogs out there?

A: While spam is definitely a bigger problem for the most influential blogs, it is decidedly an annoyance that MOST moderately successful bloggers face. Based on the initial interest that has been expressed in our service, we think this view is vindicated.

Q: What can you tell us about how your filter works?

A: Nothing, sorry.

Q: Will you buy everyone free beer because you used slides in your presentation?

A: No. Learn to love slides.

Why has commenting on blogs become such a pain in the neck lately? Why are there so many hoops and hurdles to jump through? We certainly wouldn’t tolerate such nonsense in the “real world”, so why has it become par-for-the-course in the blogosphere?

Consider the following analogy: You’ve just finished an expensive meal at a decent restaurant, but you’re less-than-satisfied. The steak you ordered came shoe-leathery and dry rather than juicy and tender like you’d requested. You want to let management know. Filling out a comment card seems like the right thing to do, so you pull out your trusty astronaut pen and fill out the feedback form that was left with your bill.

Now, would you stand for any of the following?

• The restaurant makes you register in their customer database before accepting your comment card
• The Maitre D’ asks you decipher some jumbled letters and numbers he’s scratched onto a napkin
• The manager requests that you prove your mathematical mettle by summing 2 + 5
• On your first visit, the chef insists that he size you up to make sure your comment card will be worthy
• Months after visiting the restaurant, a crank caller dials you up and says “Nice!”
• Not infrequently, your comment card gets tossed out with the day’s trash

Acceptable? No way!

Yet, sadly, this seems to be the way of the blogosphere today: many bloggers insist that readers register in order to take part in the conversation; others use captchas or simple cognitive tests to stop bots; others still, choose to moderate first time posters. And who hasn’t had to deal with those seemingly random one-word comments (Cool!) on ancient posts? Worst of all, some perfectly good comments will invariably find their way into a black hole.

Quite frankly, it’s become an embarrassingly convoluted process… all because of one seemingly innocuous word: SPAM.

The fact that nearly 95% of comments are spam (yes, that’s more than 9 out of 10) means that bloggers have had to do whatever it takes to get spam under control. The methods used however create unnecessary friction (and headaches!) which dampen the conversation and make blogging less fun than it could be.

We want to change that. We want to worry about your blog spam so you don’t have to. We want to make blogging fun again. Stay tuned, we’ll be live soon.

However, if you’re inpatient (and like to be on the bleeding edge) you might be interested in beta-testing the Defensio system. Sign-up at Defensio.com today!