[spam-stopper] A small akismet extension for separating ham from spam

[rich boakes]

Hi Folks,

For me, Akismet was great at first because it 
identified the spam, and (although rare) when 
there were false positives, there was only 10:1 
spam ratio so the real messages were really obvious.

The recent upsurge in comments (and thus the 
upsurge in Akismet's quarry) has had a 
detrimental knock-on effect on the ease of 
separating ham from spam.

The task of spotting a piece of false-positive 
ham in the middle of hundreds of spams is no 
different to what we were doing before, manually 
sifting through every message - the only change 
is that instead of looking for "ham to accept" 
we now have to look for "ham to de-spam".

To improve this I added a "Worst Offenders" 
section to the 1.15 version of Akismet.  It 
lists the IP addresses and domains that appear 
most frequently, and allows the user to delete 
these en-masse, reducing the amount of spam/ham 
filtering to a far more manageable amount.

It's manageable on my site anyway, your mileage 
may differ.

The updated plugin is here:
http://boakes.org/download/akismet-1.15-wo.zip

It hopefully proves that such a system is fairly 
useful, and might give people a few ideas for 
better solutions.

Thinking forward I was considering two avenues 
of development that might be useful:

(1) combine the worst-offenders IP addresses 
with the existing WP capability to write the 
.htaccess file, thus having a dynamic deny list 
that targets active spam-bots.

(2) to allow more experimentation, the Akismet 
size of things could be made a bit more 
pluggable with filters triggered when the spam 
page is submitted and displayed.  This could 
enable akismet plugin-lets to provide more 
intelligent management functions (like this one) 
without having to update the core plugin).

Anyway; food for thought and a plugin to play 
with.  Hope it's useful :)

Rich
--
http://boakes.org