Anti-spam services: Defensio vs Akismet
I’ve decided to try out Defensio, to see if it beats Akismet as an anti-spam plugin for WordPress. Akismet is a nice simple “set and forget” solution but the odd false negative does slip through occasionally. The setup process for Defensio is almost identical to Akismet but the management interface looks better and they have a nice statistics page for individual blogs (rather than Akismet’s overall spam graph).
Let’s see how it goes…
November 8th, 2007 at 1:44 pm
Have you created anything like CFAkismet for working with Defensio?
November 8th, 2007 at 2:00 pm
@Mike: nope. I only use Akismet and Defensio on my WordPress blog. But someone should definitely write a ColdFusion port for the community.
December 18th, 2007 at 9:56 pm
This is the first I’ve heard of Defensio, thanks for brining it to my attention. How’s your experiment going so far? Any initial thoughts about Defensio vs Akismet?
I’d love to read more about your experience with it.
They have a great by-line… outsmarting evil spam… hehe.
January 2nd, 2008 at 2:11 am
I’m currently developing a web app which will have support for anti-spam services. So far from your experience, which of the two seems the best?
The fact that Defensio has an open API is a good incentive for us at the moment, but if Akismet offers a better service…
January 2nd, 2008 at 4:41 pm
@alex: i’m liking defensio a lot. The admin interface for WordPress is great and the service is very good. I get quite a lot of spam on this blog and it’s only the more subtle spam comments that get through. false positives are pretty rare too. I don’t see any reason to go back to Akismet at the moment.
January 2nd, 2008 at 5:08 pm
Thanks for the info Martin, I’m going to try Defensio out on my blog for a while and see how things pan out.
January 6th, 2008 at 10:59 am
Defensio claims 99.77% accuracy, hope that is true. Thanks for introducing it.
Please keep us updated and compare the two so we can get a better understanding of the pros and con.
February 18th, 2008 at 10:46 am
thanks for post martin, i’m apply aksimet but spammer very active
March 7th, 2008 at 4:52 am
I use Akismet on my WordPress blog I wonder if there would be any way to test them side by side. I saw on your test that Defensio had 90% of the comments were spam and that in the above comment it said that it was 99.77% accurate. I know on my blog with Akismet it says that 98% of my comments are spam. That is a big difference or 90% vs 98%. Does Defensio allow you to see what comments it blocks to see if it is really Spam or not?
March 20th, 2008 at 5:52 pm
I might have to check it out. Not sure that Akismet is doing the job I want. It seems the more you try and stop spam, the harder the spammers try.