[wp-hackers] Re: [spam-stopper] New plugin version

[Matt Mullenweg]

Roland Haeder wrote:
> My idea is to create another "hook" where all spam-plugins shall return their 
> weight value into it:
> 
> - Zero: No comments / cannot complain about it / plugin doesn't know how to 
> deal with it
> - minus values: more spam than ham
> - plus values: more ham than spam :-)

I would posit that an independent plugin system like that would always 
be less effective because none of the weightings would know anything 
about the other weightings, and it would really only be useful to people 
interested in endlessy tweaking the scoring. You'd have to test every 
change in weighting against a non-trivial corpus of known spam and ham. 
(At least a million of each.)

Also how would you weight an external system like Akismet, which already 
does thousands of tests and is being constantly adjusted?

I don't like tests that sit on the fence. Either call it or don't.

-- 
Matt Mullenweg
  http://photomatt.net | http://wordpress.org
http://automattic.com | http://akismet.com