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.