For many, many years, I had been using Spam Karma 2 for comment, pingback, and trackback spam protection here on my blog and it seemed to do a decent job. The idea behind SK2 is to check for things like Javascript (few bots have JS enabled), the number of links in the post (spam obviously has lots usually), how long it took them to post the comment (bots post it nearly instantly), and so forth. Each property would add or subtract karma points from the comment until a final score was given. The comment would then be marked as ham (good) or spam (bad) based on that score.
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.