Bloggers Buzz

Tags: akismet, comment spam, anti spam

Akismet the effectve anti spam service for blogsand more has introduced a tiered pricing structure:

The first thing you’ll notice is the Enterprise access now has several price levels starting from $50/mo based on how many blogs you have. This should allow more flexibility for businesses just getting started out.

Second we’ve seen a lot of use of the Akismet API for things which aren’t blogs at all, like feedback forms, guestbooks, and more.  For this type of use people might find it easiest to purchase commercial use based on the number of calls they make to Akismet, so we conjured up a new system called the Access API, which also starts at $50 a month.

For more details head over to the Akismet blog

Tags: wordpress, spam, plugins,

If you hate spam, I’m with you all the way. Thats why its good news all round to be able to report that Bad Behaviour 2 Beta 1 has now been released for download. Some of the changes include:

• Trackback spam is pretty much dead. If you see a trackback spam get past Bad Behavior, I want to know about it.
• Bad Behavior is stopping 99% or more of comment spam and an unknown amount of automated wiki vandalism. (I have no chicken to measure it.)
• A check which required waiting five seconds before submitting POST requests has been removed. While it showed some benefit in stopping spam, it was unduly interfering with legitimate activity.
• A check for misconfigured proxy servers has been disabled. While it blocked quite a bit of spam, it also blocks many corporate and government users, not to mention the entire country of Singapore. This appears to be a Microsoft ISA Server bug or misconfiguration, and when someone tells me how to fix it, this check will be re-enabled.
• Several additional checks for spam and malicious activity have been added.
• Database logging has been revamped, and the verbose option reinstated. When verbose is off, only blocked requests and some suspicious requests will be logged. On most requests, with verbose option off, Bad Behavior will make only one database query (to retrieve its settings).
• On WordPress, the administrative screen has been expanded. You can now turn verbose mode logging on or off from this screen.
• Once again, strangely enough it seems to be even faster than previous versions.

For more information check out the website