Their first single to chart in the UK was called You’re History. And that’s exactly what I say to Defensio on this blog today.

After 5 months using it, the first couple of months were great, after teaching it the commenting regime on this blog it caught all my spam comments with no problem.

Unfortunately, beginning of May is where it started to go wrong. It marked a number of genuine comments as spam and couldn’t process some other comments. Same thing happened in June. Last night I had to “unspam” 6 more comments (including one from Donncha and two from my Dad) and then today I had to self-process another 20 messages because Defensio seemed incapable. I then did the same thing on Mini! Mini! Mini!.

So, Defensio, You’re History.

Continuing the musical theme, Thin Lizzy’s The Boys Are Back In Town. Where “The Boys” = Akismet. Can someone remind me why I left please?

On another note, this theme is starting to piss me off. I don’t know why, it’s been great. But I feel a change coming on. Possibly single column with the “sidebar” at the bottom. Expect Change.

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.

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.

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.