I have been running Defensio for a week now.

253 positive spam comments and only 8 false positive hits. Not bad in my book as the current accuracy is at 97.05%.

What I seem to be loving about Defensio is it’s simplicity in spam management.

• Color code comments based on spaminess
• Obvious spam is hidden
• Spam statistics made available through the WordPress admin page.
• Enhanced statistics, reports and graphs accessible through the Defensio Account Management page on the Defensio’s site.
• RSS feeds for spam and comments.

Spam is something every Blog owner has to deal with on a daily basis. I had 253 positive spam and only 18 legitimate comments. Everyday I spend a few minutes going through the possible spam list and comb out the false positives. Askimet was good but Defensio went one step further by incorporating the color codes and hiding confirmed spam. This dramatically reduced the amount of data I had to go trough now thus improving my admin experience.

The RSS feed option for comments and spam further simplifies access to your spam and comments. Everything through Google reader for me.

The Enhanced statistic made available through the Account Management page on Defensio’s site is also pretty neat. Not the most important but admin’s love looking at historically data presented through use of graphs and diagrams. Simplification again.

Source: Defensio

Source: Defensio Blog

Finally managed to upgrade to WordPress 2.3.1 today. Needed quite a few tweaks here and there but everything seems to be holding togather now.

Over the next week I’ll be fine tuning the functionality side of things so expect to see some errors. Learning the whole new Tags phenomenon now

For now these are the plug ins I have running on my shiny new WordPress installation.

1. All in One SEO Pack
2. Cforms II
3. Defensio Anti-Spam
4. FeedBurner FeedSmith
5. Get Recent Comments
6. Google XML Sitemaps
7. My Dashboard
8. Related Posts (Will be replaced by Simple Tags)
9. Simple Tags
10. Sociable
11. Subscribe To Comments
12. Tag Suggest Thing
13. Ultimate Google Analytics
14. WordPress Reports
15. WordPress Reports Most Active Widget

Defensio is the latest comment spam filtering service for blogs and web applications. Blogging platforms currently supported are WordPress, PixelPost, Umbraco, Drupal, Mephisto, Movable Type and TextPattern. Web applications can see integration through the following platforms, Ruby On Rails, .Net, Java, PHP and Python.

Currently, the only big player out there doing the same is Askimet. Askimet surprisingly was very positive about the new competitor on the block.

Quoted from them, read more here.

It’s hard to have a market with only one player.

Denfensio and Askimet both use centralized APIs to validate comment spams but Denfensio currently goes a bit further with some additional features.

• Spam quarantine sorted by spaminess
• Background color applied to spam comments to increase ease-of-identification
• Spam comments collapsed (and restorable) to allow for easy and efficient navigation
• Very obvious spam can be hidden from view
• Performance statistics provided to show how Defensio is doing on your blog

Defensio is a replacement for Askimet but I don’t see this happening anytime soon and Askimet has been around for sometime now. It’s going to be hard to get users to switch.

The latest plugin for Defensio can be downloaded here if you would like to take it for a spin. I’ve installed it at home today so it’s going to take sometime to come to a conclusion to see which path I will follow. For now Askimet works best for me.

Source : Defensio

Source : Askimet

The first maintenance release for WordPress 2.3(Dexter) was released a few days back. WordPress 2.3.1.

This release covers over 20 bugs. The list of bugs fixed can be viewed here.

1. Tagging support for Windows Live Writer
2. A login bug that affected those with a Blog Address different than
3. their WordPress Address is fixed
4. Faster taxonomy database queries, especially tag intersection queries
5. Link importer fixes

The Danesh Project is running 2.2.3 as I have not found a good reason to upgrade yet. Maybe in a month or so. For now I have it running on my Dev machines at home.

How’s your experience been with Dexter?

Source : boren.nu

WordPress 2.3 Release Candidate 1 is now availble for download.

This will be the only release candidate before the final release before the 2.3 final release scheduled for 24th September 2007.

Download WordPress 2.3 RC1 here and report any lingering bugs here. Also, if you have multiple plugins installed then update the plugin compatibility list. This will helpful to the plugin authors fixing incompatible plugins and also users looking for plugins.

Personal Note : I am 5 hours behind on this post. Slept at 9am today and it’s now 6pm. I need more rest!!

Source : WordPress