Yay for open APIs! Some users of Tabulas noted that spam comments were increasing in frequency ... so it was obviously time to pick a solution that didn't involve my time, or some convoluted test (i.e. captcha).

At first, I wanted to implement my own Bayesian filter, but then I realized that'd take too much time to set-up. So after hearing a lot about Akismet (run by the guys who do Wordpress, an excellent product), I decided to give it a shot.

What's so great is not only their REST API, but the fact that other people had written the wrappers around the API already! I gave the PHP one a quick install, and then ran it through with some spammy comments. It got them all!

Well, that convinced me to open up my wallet and pay the $50/month for 50,000 requests. After hooking in the code (didn't take more than 20 minutes) I retroactively checked all comments since Septemer, and found close to 2000 spammy comments. Good lord!

Anyways, a fine job to the Akismet guys. What I really loved about the whole process was that within 20 minutes of making a decision, I could test their API (for free). And when I needed more queries, it was super easy to pay.

Of course, compare this to what a company like Yahoo! does when you run out of queries for any given API: you can't get anymore. Period. You can't pay, you can't ask ... all you can do is hijack another computer with another IP and get a new API key and cheat the system for more. You can't even pay for more or anything. How dumb is that? How does Yahoo! expect us to build stuff on top of their APIs if there's going to be a ceiling to what we can do? Sheesh.

So great job, Automattic, on a most excellent service!