An Aussie geek stuck in Texas

Akismet is a new online anti-spam service that has recently been launched by Matt (the main guy behind Wordpress) to prevent spam reaching your blog through comments and trackbacks. Basically what it does is send details of the comment/trackback including it’s content to the Akismet server(s) where it is analyzed and determined to be spam or not and then a flag is sent back to your blog accordingly.

What do I think of it? Well first a disclaimer, I haven’t tried nor am I likely to. A third party service that you depend upon for commenting to work in your blog? Uhm no thanks, what happens when it is down? I know they probably have all sorts of privacy rules but really it is hard not to think that they will eventually do something with your comments like inject contextual based advertising (again their policy may state they will never do that I just haven’t read it so it is a gut feel only). Plus it isn’t free for all bloggers and requires a Wordpress.com account to use although you don’t have to actively use your wordpress.com blog.

Spam Karma 2 has been doing a wonderful job so far for me, in an early version it had a couple of false negatives but since then it has caught all spam and let everything else through without any dramas so why do I need Akismet again?

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