Premium Spam
March 2, 2011
My spam filters seem to be having a tough time recently. I’m thinking more of email filters, rather than Akismet. That said, I wish that Akismet was a little less hospitable to certain Russian-writing agents. While I took a little Russian in high school, the main result was that I realized how bad at languages I am.
Three messages that gmail somehow let through (to andrew at changingway dot org) made me smile, though.
- Healthier way to smoke.
- Make happy the girlfriend! Present to the girlfriend unforgettable night!
- hi! My neighbor died because his viral infection was mistaken for bacterial…
Each one pure spam comedy gold, but I have to give first place to the last on the list. The switch from the chirpy “hi!” to the details of death has a sort of brilliance.
If gmail is going to let spam through, then I’m not too unhappy that it picked these three.
WordPress (not com) Themes: Search and Spam
January 14, 2011
After the good news about themes at WordPress.com comes some bad news about themes for self-hosted WordPress sites. Siobhan Ambrose at WPMU.org wondered what she’d find if she Googled “Free WordPress Themes.” She examined themes from each of the top 10 hits for that search.
The result? Only one of the 10 theme sites was “safe.” Another was “iffy.” For the other 8, Siobhan’s advice is “avoid,” on the basis that some of the themes use Base64 encoding in order to sneak spammy links into the theme. Base64 can also be used to include malware.
The safe site is the WordPress.org themes directory. Since it currently includes well over a thousand themes, there seems little danger of a free theme shortage. Each of the themes there is under the GPL, and so is free as in freedom and well as free as in beer. In other words, you are free to modify the code of those themes.
This doesn’t mean that every source of free themes other than the official WordPress.com directory is bad. What it does mean is that, just as social media attracts spam, social media tools attract spam-producing components. It also means that some of the people who make those components also study the dark side of SEO.
Mollom: Milestones and Money
October 9, 2008
Mollom is one of four spam comment fighting services that I’ve covered before. Mollom has enough recent news to merit a fresh post. Centernetworks’ Allen Stern summarized as follows: Mollom Leaves Beta, Hits 10 Million Blocked Spams, Launches Paid Plans.
The Mollom site provides further detail. Dries posted that: Drupal is still the main platform for users with Mollom subscriptions, with Joomla! coming second, and WordPress third. The pricing page contrasts two levels of service: Free and Plus. Plus costs 30 Euros a month (which, at current exchange rates, is about $40, rather than the $30 Allen quotes).
AntiSpam: TypePad and the Trio
May 30, 2008
There’s a new spam fighting service in town: TypePad AntiSpam. To put it another way, the spam sheriff of TypePad town is now available to lay down the law elsewhere.
TPAS competes directly with Akismet. The table compares the two spamfighting services with each other, and with two other competitors. I’ve ordered the columns from earliest to most recent (so the alphabetical order is coincidental).
| Akismet | Defensio | Mollom | TypePad AntiSpam | |
| Previous post at Changing Way? | Yes | Yes | Yes | No |
| Service offered by | Automattic | Karabunga | Mollom: shares founder with Acquia | Six Apart |
| If in doubt, challenge with CAPTCHA? | No | No | Yes | No |
| Service has own API? | Yes | Yes | Yes | No, uses Akismet API |
| Open source engine? | No | No | No | Yes |
| Free of charge for personal use? | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Free for commercial use?* | No | No | No | Yes |
Each of the four is the odd one out in at least one sense. Akismet was first out, and remains the service against which each rival positions itself.
Defensio is the one that doesn’t share developers or an organization with a prominent publishing or content management platform (Akismet/WordPress, Mollom/Drupal, TPAS/TypePad and Movable Type).
Mollom uses CAPTCHA when unsure whether a comment is ham (the good stuff) or spam, whereas each of the others queues the suspect comment for moderation. That’s something of an oversimplification about the others: for example, a TPAS client can use CAPTCHA when told about a suspect comment by the server.
TPAS is open source (GPL V2). I found this particularly interesting, given that the other three are not. They explain that source code access would help spammers. I then realized that while the TPAS inference engine is open, the rules are hidden.
TechCrunch is currently using TPAS via the WordPress plugin that Six Apart provide. Mike Arrington reports that TPAS is doing well so far.
Anil Dash wrote the announcement post at the Six Apart blog. TPAS also has its own blog.
Missing from the table are two of the most interesting potential comparisons: performance and market share. I suspect that we will before long see data relevant to these comparisons, and challenges to the data, and…
Update, after a few hours sleep and some further research. I made a few changes to the above.
I’d like to add that I find the name TypePad AntiSpam interesting. Or rather, I find the choice of name interesting. The name may give the impression that it’s more specific to TypePad than it really is. My guess is that Six Apart think they have a winner on their hands here, and that the success of TPAS will raise awareness and reputation for TypePad.
* Final update to this post. I decided that the last line of the table, while close to the mark, needs clarification. Hence the followup post (see the first comment to the current post).
