Defensio: Outsmarting Evil Spam

We just released a new version (1.6) of our WordPress plugin. (get it here)  It is a recommended update for everyone.

Many small things were improved and fixed, but the most interesting change is the better integration of the quarantine with WordPress 2.5 and up.  

We’ve been testing this new release for some time, but if you have any problem with this update, please let us know.

Happy blogging!

If you’re on Mephisto, you’ll be happy to know that François Beausoleil just integrated support for Defensio directly into Mephisto… No more plugin to install! While it has not been merged to the official Mephisto repository yet, François invites Rick Olson (author of Mephisto) to do so.

If you can’t wait (and I know you can’t!), you can just pull from François’ Git repository. You’ll find the instructions and explanations here.

Thanks for the support, François!

Big day for Defensio! Why? Because we’re rolling out a boatload of new functionality:

OpenID

First off, we’re pretty jazzed to announce that Defensio now supports OpenID! This is big news for you blog owners out there because you should see your accuracy improve even further; and it’s big news for all you developers because you now have one more reason to add OpenID support to your app.

For those of you unfamiliar, OpenID is essentially an open standard that allows you to log into participating web applications using a single URL to represent your identity. Practically speaking, this means you only need to remember one web address to represent yourself anywhere on the web, rather than a bunch of different login/password combinations. That’s a good thing!

If you’re a WordPress blogger, getting started couldn’t be easier. You’ll simply need to install the WP-OpenID plugin and grab the latest version of Defensio. After that, whenever a commenter drops a comment on your blog using his/her OpenID URL, this information will be sent to our servers and automagically treated (cleverly!) in our filtering algorithms.

On the developer side, we’ve incremented our API to version 1.2 to reflect the fact that the ‘audit-comment’ method now accepts the new ‘openid’ parameter. Pretty simple, n’est-ce pas?

And while OpenID logins are not quite ready for logging into your own Defensio account management panel, that functionality’s in the works, so look for it soon!

UI Enhancements

If OpenID wasn’t reason enough to upgrade your Defensio plug-in, we’ve also just added several new sorting & filtering features that should make your spam management that much easier:

- Sort by Post Date: You can now sort your spam box by post date, meaning you’ll see the spam flowing into your blog organized according to posts, in reverse chronological order. We think this will be a handy way to keep track of comments & spam associated with recently your posted articles. And of course, since it’s Defensio, everything will be secondarily sorted by spaminess, making it uber simple to pull out the false positives.

- Spam Bucketing: We’ve extended the idea of sorting by spaminess to aggregate spam comments into high level categories, or “buckets” (e.g. “Very spammy”, “Quite spammy”, etc.) which should be more meaningful than plain old percentages. While subtle, we feel this usability enhancement will helps to tidy up the interface and make it easier for you to get your head around the storm of spam hitting your blog ever day.

- Trackbacks: One of the most requested features we’ve had is the ability to separate out trackbacks from comments. We’ve added this functionality via links at the top of the spam box that enables you to see “All” (i.e. everything, the current default) or strictly “Comments” or strictly “Trackbacks”. This added flexibility should make your daily (weekly?) spam management task just a smidgen more efficient.

Whew. Lots of stuff! Please do install the latest version of the plug-in (we’re calling it 1.5) and let us know what you think!