I have been using spam karma for some time.

It has only made one mess up, where someone posted a second comment immediately after being caught by a filter after a long chain of comments in a heated debate – Spam Karma counts numbers of posts to expect over a period of time from the same person as one criteria.

It can actually use Akismet as well as another filter, although I have never needed it.

Currently this blog is below the radar on spam, only 300 spam comments per day – my biggest problem are the manual spam, but they get spanked and banned.

Now, for the tangent . . .

As you might have noticed if you’ve seen my own weblog post from yesterday:
http://sob.apotheon.org/?p=214
. . . I’ve had an on-again, off-again love-to-hate-it relationship with the Akismet plugin for WordPress. The very proprietary nature of the back end, and the privacy-threatening mechanism on which it operates, serve as effective deterrents for contributing any development effort to improving the plugin. I also find the strong potential for false positives in the Akismet spam filtering process, coupled with the piss-poor interface for double-checking the contents of the queue for false positives, to be a pretty severe shortcoming.

It’s always nice to see that someone else “gets it”, with regard to filtering systems controlled by off-site, third party heuristic methodologies. I’m pretty sure I’ve missed a few false positives “caught” by the Akismet filter during the time that I recently used it to “solve” my spam trackback issue. I’m glad I’ve solved that via a less discomfiting manner. I’m pretty sure my current answer is no less likely to result in loss of legitimate trackbacks through false positives, but at least it’s not affecting all comments.

I’m still looking into other options, as well. It’s just a race at this point between my ability to find better solutions for WordPress and my motivation to create my own weblog platform from scratch.

I was prepared to rip out the code even based on the fact that one user had reported problems (and I am glad you told me) that couldn’t be fixed easily. Today I received a second message from someone who seemed to have similar problems and the code was ripped out a few minutes later.

Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

Well, this commenting system seems to work fine now. Pity about the problems with the cookie-system. It sounded like a good idea, but didn’t seem to work well.

Good luck with the spam filtering

Owen