Spam Karma Delivers Payback
Since the move to the new server, I've been rather disappointed with how Akismet, the spam filtering plugin, had been performing. It had taken up a nasty habit of flagging almost all legit comments as spam leading me to have to continuously check the spam queue and fish them out. I started doing some searching around to see if I could find a fix only to find a similar number of people that had grown dissatisfied with Akismet's performance, especially because it discards legitimate trackbacks at an alarming rate.
Some time ago, I had heard a number of people say they had been using Spam Karma 2 to filter out bogus comments. I had always been leery of switching the anti-spam system as Akismet had been working out fine, but the recent problems prodded me into taking a closer look at it. Spam Karma 2 uses a unique "weighting" system to give each incoming comment or trackback a score based on its content. Penalties are given for using a very old post (a common spam tactic), having too many links or even posting from a blacklisted IP address. It sounded like it was worth a shot, so yesterday I grabbed SK2, installed it and flipped the switch.
Now I'm wondering why I didn't switch sooner. So far, it has a 100% accuracy rate in telling me what is and is not spam. I even dropped in a plugin that allows you to use Akismet as one of the scoring mechanisms. In conjunction with http:BL and Bad Behavior, I think we're even more bullet-proof than I may have previously declared.
Spammers beware: I'm still winning.
Jesse
Shauna
You're going the distance. You're going for speeeeeeeeeeeed.
Jesse I am being solicited by Mcafee to purchase a program called Anonymizer. They want $23 . 1st of all do you know of the program and is it any good. 2nd I have there virus protection and firewall do I need it. BTW did you see what NTRZ did today
McAfee is a scam of a company. They're always trying to upsell you on products you don't need and their products, much like Symantec's, are bloated and increasingly less effective. If you have up-to-date anti-virus software and a decent firewall program, there's no need to add anything more. Almost every e-mail provider now does spam filtering on their end and so long as you're careful about which websites you visit (and use a secure browser like FireFox), additional security programs are a waste of money.