Spamblock Improvements, Part II

Reports of the past improvements to the spamblock plugin have been very positive. On top of that, I got aware that the WordPress Akismet.com Antispam Service is available for other systems of that. So I sat down and implemented their pretty easy API into Serendipity's Spamblock plugin.

For Akismet to work, you need a Wordpress.com user account, with which you get a "API Key". You must enter this API key into the s9y spamblock plugin configuration screen, and then also set the option on how to treat Akismet marked spam (either reject or moderate).

Please try out this plugin and give us feedback. You can download the updated version here:

serendipity_event_spamblock.php and lang_en.inc.php. Put those two files into your plugins/serendipity_event_spamblock/ directory. The plugin should be compatible with Serendipity 0.9.1, 1.0-beta and 1.1-alpha.

Thanks to the guys from Akismet for offering a freely available API to check Spam against! Letting the development community fight spam with bundled efforts is the only way we might get rid of the annoying destroyers of the Web.

Spamblock improvements

As some of you might have noticed, the comment/trackback spam is currently improving again. The spamblock plugin currently can catch a lot of spam, but had a slight weakness in terms of processing the ruleset.

Usually, the spamblock plugin walks all MODERATE/REJECT rules, and aborts that checking once the first rule hits on a mail. Recently it showed up that most spam is set to "MODERATE" even before some more aggressive spam detection rules were executed, so you might have received Moderation-Emails quite often for emails that would have been marked as spam later in the ruleset execution flow.

The latest version 1.40 of the spamblock plugin (Download here) will now also perform any other rule checks on a comment/trackback, even if it already had been marked as Moderate. This way, you will have the chance that another rule marks the comment as spam, and then will not infiltrate your mailbox.

Please give us feedback to tell us if this works for you, or if that new behaviour introdues any problems for you!