Spam Karma 2 Can’t Die
As I was doing a fair amount of WordPress upgrading this week, I happened to see this news alert from Dr Dave in my Spam Karma 2 screen:
1. Spam Karma Update - Coming soon:
A small update for Spam Karma should be coming soon, fixing any compatibility issues that might have been brought upon by the last half-gazilion Wordpress updates. Keep an eye on this news feed or Spam Karma’s homepage for a release announcement by the end of the month. This will also likely be the last update to Spam Karma (which should still give us all quite a few months respite from spam). Barring any unforeseeable circumstances, there will be no more compatibility update to try and keep up with Wordpress’ habit of breaking compatibility with each of their [numerous] releases. Furthermore, there is increasingly little point in "competing" against Akismet, when it is bundled and marketed as the principal Wordpress’ antispam tool (even if I personally do not like its approach).
There are thousands of WordPress plugins out there of varying degrees of quality. But Spam Karma 2 is hands down the best WordPress plugin out there. Wait, you say. Akismet rocks! It stops everything! Don’t get me wrong - Akismet is an amazing and useful service. But I agree with Dr Dave - it’s not the way to block all spam. And as someone whose email address got pegged as a spammer, it can be a real pain. I suddenly found my comments to various blogs just disappearing. Not feedback, no clue why. Finally, after emailing a fellow blogger, we discovered that my posts were in his Akismet queue - due to a mistaken blacklisting of my email address. To their credit, the Akismet folks fixed it on the second request I made. But the point is, a blacklist oriented spam list is not the best ‘overall’ way to block spam.
Spam Karma 2 works because it takes a multi-faceted approach to spam fighting. By default, it has over ten different modules which analyze each comment to figure out if it is spam or not. Add in the Akismet plugin, and you have the ultimate spam fighting arsenal. The key is, instead of being the ONLY spam fighting method, Akismet becomes oen of many weapons. And SK2’s most useful feature is it allowed you to vary the strength of each weapon to suit your needs. Follow that up with the fact that it supports outside plugins (a plugin to a plugin - ha!) and you have an amazing amount of flexibility.
I wouldn’t run a WordPress site without the SK2/Akismet combo. I’ve had plenty of comments get trapped by SK2 that Akismet still thought were ‘ham’. Yet I can’t recall when SK2 trapped a comment as spam that really was legitimate, and I use it on 10+ WordPress sites. I know some of you find Akismet to be all you need, but I often hear about ‘clearing out my Akismet queue’ like its a regular chore. I can’t imagine. I might have to moderate a couple comments a week. But the SK2/Akismet combo hammer down things so well, there are very few spam that it can’t figure out.
But Dr Dave has a point. Unlike some software that doesn’t seem to get updated much when it should be, WordPress gets updated a lot. But that’s a double edged sword. It’s great because you get new features often and get bugs fixed quickly. But the frequent release of major versions (in this case 0.1+) have caused a lot of plugin authors a lot of pain. Every time you get a chance to get your plugin stable and not chewing up your time, a new WP version comes out that breaks it and you have to fix it again. With a plugin as big and complex as SK2, I can imagine this is a heck of a chore. Do we really need 0.1 increments every 3 months? I don’t know. Clearly, there have been a lot of improvements (tagging going native, etc) worth having. But sometimes I wonder if we’re seeing WordPress churn TOO much. As someone who maintains a lot of WP based sites, they admin overhead just to keep them updated has become a real issue and makes me wish WordPress-MU was farther along.
Anyway - I’m just venting. I hope Dr Dave reconsiders, but clearly he has some exciting new stuff to deal with (he’s working on some macro level spam research). I hope enough people feel like I do and will work to keep SK2 alive and kicking. It does too much good to be left to wither. I for one don’t see SK2 as a competitor to Akismet. I rather see Akismet as an excellent addition to Spam Karma 2 
I know I’ll do whatever I can as a programmer to help keep SK2 working with new WP versions, even if just for my own selfish reasons on my own sites. So if Dr Dave really does end-of-life SK2 and you’re interested in helping keep it alive, let me know as I’ll be more than happy to help!
June 14th, 2008 at 3:38 pm
I am using CAPTCHA-Godfather plugin which I developed myself. I actually hate plugins which are using some “intelligent” analysis, because, as you say, they may mark a legitimate comment as spam. And of course, they don’t guarantee you 100% precision. I don’t want to advertise my own plugin, but it stopped 100% of spam until now. I don’t have Akismet or any other anti-spam plugin running on my blogs and everything is simply fine.