Note I have not had a chance yet to implement threaded or native paged comments yet.

Dear Defensio user,

We have reasons to believe that a few of our api keys might have been compromised and our research indicates that your key(s) might be among them.

Don’t worry, YOUR ACCOUNT WAS NOT HACKED AND YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION IS SAFE. However, in order to protect your privacy, we thought the best thing to do was to regenerate new api key(s) for you.

As of now, DEFENSIO IS NO LONGER FILTERING SPAM on your website or blog. To re-enable it, please login to your account at http://defensio.com and then go to “My API Keys” where you’ll find newly generated keys. You should then update your website or blog settings with the new key(s).

When an API key is invalid, apparently it’s supposed to go to the moderation queue, but it didn’t for me which meant I got 400-500 spams overnight on my blog. Lovely.

So, I just spent the last few minutes deleting page after page of spams from my blog. I thought I skimmed through each page looking for legit comments, but I know I missed at least one (of mine specifically). If you found one of your comments from the last 24 hours has gone missing, please post it again. I probably accidentally deleted it. Sorry.

As for Defensio, I’m still happy with their spam accuracy, but I really wish they’d fix that bug in their plugin. It was hugely annoying to wake up to so much spam on my blog. That’s the whole reason I use Defensio — to avoid that. *sigh*

It of course wasn’t perfect. Spam bots are getting smarter and a plugin such as SK2 alone just couldn’t be accurate enough. So, a year or so ago, I added an Akismet plugin for SK2. The idea is the plugin talks to Akismet and gets a ham or spam rating for the comment. This result is then given to SK2 to use in it’s overall score. It worked great, at least for a while.

However, even with the help of Akismet, SK2 just wasn’t cutting it lately. Akismet was too often saying it was ham when it really was spam or on occasion, the other way around (that ham was spam).

So, two weeks ago today, I decided to give Defensio a try.

It’s very similar to Akismet in how it works from the standpoint of the user. Every comment, pingback, and trackback is automatically submitted to Defensio’s servers for evaluation. However, the big difference, besides the increased accuracy I’ve observed (more on that in a minute), is that each comment is given a “spaminess” rating. For comments that Defesnsio feels is for sure spam, that spaminess rating will be 100% and less for ones that it’s really sure on. This makes it incredibly easy to make sure Defensio is doing a good job. You just visit Defensio’s comment spam page on your blog and glance at the short list of non-obvious spam. It hides all the obvious spam, although you can show them if you really want to.

Another great thing about Defensio is that it learns on a per-blog basis, something that I don’t believe Akismet does. Yes, Akismet uses data from everyone else out there to help learn what spam is and isn’t, but Defensio also learns about your blog specifically. For example, if you blog about Viagra (what an odd blogging subject), you’d obviously get a ton of comments about Viagra. Well, Akismet may for example think these comments are spam since Viagra is a common spam subject. Defensio would learn as you correct it and eventually get better. As they say on their site, “one person’s ham might be another person’s spam”.

They also have a section on their website where you can go to view graphs of your total spam, total ham, and accuracy. However, I had some weird bugs with their graphs. I had two March 23rd’s with the 2nd showing zero (hence the dip) as well as a spike for some reason on about the 3rd. (The large increase on the 2nd was real — my server was hammered with spam on that day.)

So, now to the important part — how did Defensio do on my blog over the past two weeks? Well, quite good actually even though they say it may take a week or two to fully adapt to your site. Here’s the stats from my Defensio spam page for the past two weeks:

• Recent accuracy: 99.86%
• 10628 spam
• 116 legitimate comments
• 9 false negatives (undetected spam)
• 6 false positives (legitimate comments identified as spam)

Okay, so it did indeed get 6 false positives, but they were very easy to find as they were right there at the top of Defensio’s page since the spam is sorted by spaminess.

So, will I continue to be using Defensio on blog? Definitely, and I recommend you do too.

Just thought I’d let you know what was up.

EDIT: Okay, everything is back to normal. Discovered the problem wasn’t plugin related.

So yeah, everything should be back and working now including the forums. Let me know if not.

EDIT: Apparently the sidebar goes all goofy when the comment form is there. I haven’t a clue why (it used to work) and frankly, nor do I really care right now. This blog is pretty dead anyway, at least for now…

EDIT 8/20: Did a database server switch, so had a day or two of downtime while that happened. All is good now. :)

I’d be willing to chip a little money your way or even better, code anything you need (WordPress plugin, theme, etc.).

Any takers?

EDIT 12/02 2:34 AM: Whoops, just noticed I accidentally changed my post permalink structure. Put back to normal now.

All should be back to normal now though.

Way cool.

I did set it up to forward to my real e-mail address, but it’s still somewhat annoying when use it. Please just use my contact form that’s linked to at the top of this page. It’s there for a reason, folks. :)

It’s a real shame too as I had already completed about 1/2 of the complete recode of it. Perhaps one day I’ll bring it back up as an invitation only service for use on non-high traffic sites, but not for now (busy with other things).

And for those who have no clue what I’m talking about, I had a script located at http://avatar.viper007bond.com/ where after signing up, you could enter the URLs to some images hosted elsewhere. Then you’d use a URL given to you by the script as your avatar or sig on forums and my script, when called, would redirect people to one of your URLs. Basically, it was an image rotator.

Sorry guys.