Defensio
Well, I’ve been really frustrated with Akismet for the inability to whitelist friends with hotmail addresses. I’ve got one blog buddy who is consistently marked as spam, and no matter how many times I unmark the spam he still ends up right back in the spam folder with his next comment. I kept looking for a whitelist, but the only one available works with an older version of Akismet and hasn’t been updated in more than a year.
So I went to the Akismet website looking for information on how I could add a whitelist, and they were introducing a competitor called Defensio. I went to the Defensio website, and their advertised features are:
-Stellar Accuracy-
You’ll deal with less spam on your blog, period.
-Easier Spam Management
Managing your spambox will become dead simple.
-Personalized Filtering
Your own habits will help make the filter better over time.
-Transparency Through Statistics
Meaningful stats so that you’ll really know what’s going on.
The personalized filtering caught my attention, and I’ve been trying it out for the past two days. So far it seems to work as well as Akismet at identifying spam, and it allows me to unmark false positives.
Update: I had some problems with a false positive as you can see in the comments below, but Defensio has, indeed, “learned.” I highly recommend it. It does appear to be better than Akismet, at least for my purposes.
Possibly related posts:
Thank you for the recommendation, Casey. I’ll give it a spin too I think.
My blog’s been overrun by spam the last few days, and I’m at the stage of frustration having to delete a few of them every few hours.
God bless, and Shalom!
Ha, ha. Yours was caught as spam, but it shouldn’t be now. Can you try commenting again? I want to see if it really does learn.
I thought it was caught as spam when my comment didn’t appear. Poor me!
Am using it on my blog now, and it’s caught the spam that leaked past Akismet. I love it already!
God bless, and Shalom!
Hmm… it didn’t learn. My last comment was still as spam. What did you set your spamminess level at? Mine is at 50%.
Hmm. These false positives are just as annoying as Akismet’s. I’m going to look more into the features and see if I can’t find a way to whitelist people, since that’s what I was looking for in the first place. The spamminess level is only what gets hidden in the spam folder. It doesn’t change the way that spam is determined. I just left mine at 80%.
So far I haven’t had a problem with genuine comments on my blog with that setting though. Maybe it’s not supposed to affect, but if it works alright for me at that setting, I’ll leave it.
If you need help testing, let me know.
Thanks, Isaiah. I looked through their website, but I can’t find a whitelist feature. I submitted a question on their forum to see if it is possible to whitelist certain addresses. We’ll see what they say.
I hope they are able to give you the answer you are looking for.
They said Defensio would “learn.” Apparently it has, since your last comment went through!
Yes, I thought it did finally learn, as I was surprised to see my comment go through finally!
BTW, I thought you might be interested to know that Akismet now has a new version that was just released today.
http://blog.akismet.com/2007/12/17/new-plugin-version-21/
A couple of days too late. I’ve made the switch to Defensio.
That’s what I thought too.
I’m sticking with Defensio as well, but I’ve bookmarked the new Akismet just in case.