Comments on: Defensio is tiring me

By: Decided to give Defensio Anti-Spam a shot… over Akismet » Chaos Laboratory

Fri, 20 Jun 2008 09:27:17 +0000

[...] going through a bunch of reviews – both positive and negative, I decided to go ahead and give Defensio a try. For those who didn’t know, Defensio is a [...]

By: NSpeaks

NSpeaks — Sun, 11 May 2008 15:07:18 +0000

@sms laenud: It would be risky and highly not recommended.

By: sms laenud

sms laenud — Fri, 09 May 2008 15:31:56 +0000

Can’t you use both? First run the spam through Akismet then through Defensio? Or the other way around?

By: BestLaptopz

BestLaptopz — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 11:14:13 +0000

Akismet is always a good bet. I don’t know about Defensio since I never used this kind of service, thanks for letting me know what Defensio is. But if you switched your service from Akismet to Defensio earlier, it means you were not happy with Akismet, didn’t you?

By: Only Blu

Only Blu — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 22:31:51 +0000

Uh uh, akismet still the one. it’s old school. But you know some say, how to do it right? it’s always the old school way.
Awesome catch buddy! Send my regard to emma

By: NSpeaks

NSpeaks — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 15:52:00 +0000

m@ » Well said. Well the comment volume only shows this much when I have defensio…for past few days only 3 or 4 comments now showed up in Akismet queue.

By: NSpeaks

NSpeaks — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 15:51:04 +0000

eXtraNeT » I would recommend Akismet over Defensio.

By: m@

m@ — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 20:10:45 +0000

Although I’m sure I don’t get the comment volume you do, I have always been happy with Akismet. Why fix what’s not broken? When I have problems with Akismet, then I will go looking for a replacement.

By: eXtraNeT

eXtraNeT — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 17:40:10 +0000

so would you recommend this defensio over akismet or is it a toss-up? o_O
~Mike

By: Anne Ahira

Anne Ahira — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 13:54:08 +0000

9000 comments? Wow!
I even got tired already with less than 100 comments.
That’s right dude. Anti spam plugins are really needed.

Anne Ahira’s last blog post..The Finance With Bad Credit

By: Handphone

Handphone — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 16:07:47 +0000

I am happy with Akismet & bcSpamBlock to fight againts spam

Handphone’s last blog post..FreeTones 1.11

By: NSpeaks

NSpeaks — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 15:49:50 +0000

http://nspeaks.com/109/optimis.....of-a-blog/ is the post I am talking about. Though I am not using Defensio now, it happened every 2 -3 days when 8-12 comments remained unprocessed and sometimes even more under this post.

I never used any other spam service. Either Akismet or Defensio remained here one at a time.

By: Carl Mercier

Carl Mercier — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 15:47:06 +0000

Your frequent commenters should make it through just fine. Were you using any other anti-spam mechanism along Defensio? Captcha, Bad Behavior or something like that?

On what post dod you get the unprocessed comment problem? And do you have an idea around when it happened? It’s probably a coincidence but I’ll still take a look.

Thanks for your help!

By: NSpeaks

NSpeaks — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 15:42:39 +0000

Yes, decline was caused by FP more. Imagine my friend’s mail in defensio queue inspite of the fact that he has commented lot of times before here. So doesn’t defensio checks wordpress approved commentors?

But why does it happen that only one post’s comments remain unprocessed? It didn’t happen for other 130 posts on this blog.

By: Carl Mercier

Carl Mercier — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 15:38:32 +0000

I noticed that you had more FP than FN, but my question was, when the decline started happening, was it mostly caused by FP or FN?

We had a short amount of downtime a while ago, which might have caused the “comments couldn’t be processed” message. However, you should’ve seen a message at the top of your admin panel and a “process now” button to automatically send them to Defensio. No manual moderation is needed.

As for getting less spam on Akismet, you probably have the option “Automatically discard spam comments on posts older than a month.” checked.

By: NSpeaks

NSpeaks — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 15:32:40 +0000

Another strange thing about Defensio….whenever I use defensio – i receive 30 approx spam comments daily….but now I am on akismet for past 1 or 2 days and only 2-3 spam comments since. Coincidence?

By: NSpeaks

NSpeaks — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 15:31:03 +0000

As clear from the graph, I have to fight with False positives more(140 false positives in around 9000 comments as compared to 44 false negatives).

Another point about one post specifically on this blog….comments never reached under defensio….they were always under Awating moderation queue (about 10-12 comments made in matter of 1-2 minutes – none caught by Defensio)…and I had to manually process them every time. This happens only for 1 post on this blog. This means, defensio plugin was not able to connect to Defensio servers since when I manually processed, all were correctly recognised as spam.

By: Carl Mercier

Carl Mercier — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 15:16:50 +0000

Hmmm. That’s definitely not normal and not something we typically see. The curve should be going the other way around! The next few days are a little crazy for me, but I’ll spend some time investigating your case further later this week.

In order to shed some light on this, I have a few questions if you don’t mind: What do you feel has been causing the accuracy to go down lately? False-positives (ham caught as spam) or False-negatives? How long were you waiting on average before retraining mistakes?

Can you point me to some of the false positives you had to unspam?

Thanks for your help!