Defensio: Outsmarting Evil Spam

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!

Well, after just a few days out in the wild, there has been a ton of stuff written about Defensio, and fortunately most of it is good!Here’s a few of the good-est:

• Techcrunch: Defensio sorts blocked comments by “spaminess”
• Byrne Reese (Six Apart): Movable Type Dev Forum
• EasyWordpress: Defensio, the Real spam killer has arrived
• InstigatorBlog: Two Montreal startups launch: Defensio and CakeMail
• Jon Lee: Defensio out of Private Beta!
• Montreal Gazette: Defensio goes after blog spam
• ArchGFX: Defensio
• MontrealTechWatch: Defensio promises to end evil spam
• Problogger: Defensio Launches - a Competitor for Akismet
• AllSeoContest: Will Defensio surpass Akismet?
• YugaTech: Defensio anti comment spam system
• SuccessCreeations: Defensio promisses competition for spam killing Akismet

Thanks to everyone who is supporting our bid to rid the web of the annoyance of spam.

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.