For the past several years, Google’s reCAPTCHA has verified a user’s humanity by forcing you to decipher warped, nonsensical text. reCAPTCHA’s method of protecting websites from spam has long put the burden on the user to prove that he is not an abusive bot. This is all about to change as a result of Google’s…
Akismet is celebrating a huge milestone today. According to its spam counter, it has now blocked over 100,000,000,000 spam messages. Not all of that spam has originated from WordPress powered websites. Thanks to a number of libraries and an API, Akismet can be used on different content management systems as well as services.
Pete Davies of Akismet presented a 31 minute presentation at WordCamp San Francisco detailing the history of spam as well as talking about the creation of Akismet.
There is a great post over on the Akismet blog talking about some of the newest trends they have noticed in web spam since 2005. Among them are Chinese wholesaler spam, human-posted spam, and malware spam. Considering the large volume of comments running through the Akisemet service, it’s always interesting to see what the trends…