In reply to Paul.

Hi Paul,

I'm a great admirer of Sergej's work as well. Our FV Antispam should be a drag and drop replacement for AntiSpam Bee. We are focused on getting rid of machinebots which has the side benefit of bringing your Akismet count way down (about 90 to 98% by our tests). This means you and your clients don't need ultraexpensive high volume Akismet plans but just the standard ones (free for blogs these days, pay for agencies and commercial sites).

I can't remember any more why we created our own antispam plugin rather than use Antispam Bee: I think at the time Antispam Bee was missing a couple of settings we needed (it has them now). We were trying to create a javascript only solution which would kill all bots. We finally gave up on that as the spammers can always program around javascript only solutions (false positives were also a big issue with fiddly javascript). We'd been using WP Spam Free but the load from WP Spam Free had our enterprise hosting account shut down (we weren't expert enough in servers then to identify the bad actor fast enough, we'd figure it out in a couple of hours now).

Anyway, I'd recently looked at Antispam Bee and was thinking about just shutting down FV Antispam and move over to Antispam Bee (to lower our maintenance load). Instead, we updated substantially and now that Antispam Bee is gone can heartily recommend FV Antispam to Akismet users to improve speed under heavy comment load and to keep your Akismet request count reasonable.

Good luck to Sergej in his future projects!

PS. If any Antispam Bee have any suggestions for FV Antispam, please let me know.