Defensio: Outsmarting Evil Spam

Alistair Croll just wrote a nice article about us on GigaOM.  Feel free to stop by and let the world know why you love Defensio!

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.