Defensio – The Verdict

January 10th I posted Defensio – Early Signs aren’t great.

At the time the spam killer Akismet replacement had been running less than 24 hours. In one of the comments Mat, one of the Defensio developers confirmed my theory that the application would need a little time to settle in and get used to the comment traffic on the blog.

Now, I am the first to admit that the comment rate on my blog isn’t huge. I really really appreciate every single comment that I get. It means that someone has found my writing worthy of a reply. Mat suggested that I:

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

Well, I’m glad to say that he was absolutely spot on.

Latest Spam Count Not only has Defensio stopped offering the false-positives, it hasn’t let any false negatives through either. That’s not (I think) a huge spam count, I have seen numbers on some blogs at 5,000 caught per day. However, it’s doing its job and that works for me!

Trent said:

When something isn’t broken, why fix it.

Whilst I agree that Akismet was performing really well on my blog, mainly for the reasons detailed in the Bye Bye Akismet post, I tried Defensio. I like the nice clean layout that you get in the dashboard. It’s much more “flowy” than the Akismet interface, and with a little AJAX worked in for good measure the selection, deselection and hiding of obvious spam makes life really easy.

If you are using Spam Karma 2 or Akismet for your comment spam then please at least look at Defensio. Like me, I’m sure you won’t regret it.

Collin on January 19, 2008 | Filed Under Words

7 Comments

Trent on January 19th, 2008

I actually put up Defensio as an option on my WPMU install and think that I will put it on my main blog at http://onvertigo.com and see how it makes out! I am glad you stuck this out and gave it an outstanding recommendation Collin :) It is nice to see that there is an alternative to Akismet because competition is the best way to grow innovation.

Nice to see another post as well! ;)

Mat on January 19th, 2008

Thanks for the follow-up Cornell, and happy to hear you’re enjoying Defensio!

brightfeather on January 21st, 2008

I’m very happy with Defensio’s performance thus far. :)

Richard on January 21st, 2008

I’m happy so far with Defensio as well. I’m in a spam lull right now so it really hasn’t gotten a workout on my blog yet, but I know it will.

Thanks for posting your update. It gives me even more confidence in my decision.

Trent on January 24th, 2008

You know something really interesting. Take a look at this plugin pack (for WPMU) but should work with normal WP as well. I installed it and haven’t had a spam comment show up for Defensio yet on onvertigo and Akismet has only had to deal with 5 comments since installing it 2 weeks ago on trentadams.com. Might be another “helper” up and above Bad Behavior of course :)

Collin on January 24th, 2008

Hmm, the theory is good Trent, but I have an inherent hatred of anything CAPTCHA related.

Have you had decent comments since you installed the pack?

Trent on January 24th, 2008

That is 1 out of the 3 plugins in there, but I would imagine you don’t need that one installed. It is just a 4 + 3 = 7 type deal so it is pretty non intrusive I think anyways.

Cornell Finch