Defensio – Early Signs Aren’t Great

Twenty four hours after installing Defensio as a replacement to Akismet I went and looked at the spam counts for the plugin this afternoon. Defensio False Positives That’s not exactly a good start for the plugin now is it.

Seven “innocents” and five false positives. I don’t know how old Defensio is – the older it is then the more mature the database will be and the less false positives there will be.

For those that don’t know, a false positive is a legitimate blog comment that is not spam but has been marked as such by the application.

Reading the “skinny” on the Defensio website, it would appear that the application adapts to each blogger. Therefore, if I’m reading it right, it means that it will take a while to settle down and perform properly.

I will give it until the 18th, keeping an eye on it as much as I can and report back.

Collin on January 10, 2008 | Filed Under Words

10 Comments

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Richard on January 10th, 2008

Since you get a lot more spams than I’m getting right now, it will be interesting to see how quickly Defensio learns. AkisMATT was a very slow learner in my experience.

Mat on January 10th, 2008

It is entirely normal that performance be volatile in the first little while while our algorithms adapt to your blog’s content and comment traffic.

Give it a couple weeks (provided your comment traffic is sufficiently high) and I think you’ll see a marked difference.

Collin on January 10th, 2008

Hi Mat – thanks for stopping by!

I will certainly give it a couple of weeks – I am quite happy to do that, as I said – I will leave it until the 18th and make (hopefully!) an informed decision then.

Trent on January 11th, 2008

I have used Akismet in several fashions since the beginning and other than a couple isolated examples, it has been 100%. While I plan on testing out Defensio, I am using Akismet as my main protection. When something isn’t broken, why fix it.

Andy C on January 11th, 2008

Installed Defensio today and also watching with interest.

My preferred solution was Spam Karma 2 which was close to perfect but started logging obtuse mySQL errors.

Akismet offers 5 (obvious spam) comments for moderation daily which is just too much when you’re as lazy as me.

Donncha O Caoimh on January 14th, 2008

Any chance you could run both side by side? Obviously it’ll take a bit of hacking but it shouldn’t be too hard to record the results from each and display them on the moderation page.

Collin on January 14th, 2008

Is that SK2 and Defensio or Akismet and Defensio Donncha?

I’ll see what I can do. The install instructions for Defensio said that I should turn off ALL other spam catchers.

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