TypePad AntiSpam: Four Months of Spam Freedom

We just celebrated four months of TypePad AntiSpam doing what it does best: Working quietly in the background to keep the junk off of your site. To mark the milestone of millions of spurious comments having been spurned, we thought we'd catch you up a little bit on what's been going on in the TypePad AntiSpam world.

First, TyepPad AntiSpam got some nice coverage from bloggers and the press:

• CMSWire says Six Apart Challenges Akismet on the AntiSpam Front: "Watchout Akismet…here comes TypePad AntiSpam. Six Apart is known for creating great working platforms as well as apps and plugins for a variety of other platforms. With the recent release of a blogging anti-spam plugin, they are proving yet again that they are here to stay as the competition heats up on the social web."

• InformationWeek says Can the Spam: "The new kid on the block is TypePad AntiSpam. TypePad AntiSpam is just a few weeks old, but it's already garnered some very positive reviews."

• And Weblog Tools Collection brought the message of free, open source antispam to the WordPress community with Hot or Not: TypePad AntiSpam: "The product is being tested by quite a few bloggers and has already received positive feedback for effectiveness from big names such as Michael Arrington of TechCrunch"

Of course, it's just as gratifying to see the responses of the sites that are actually using the service. TechCrunch's early and enthusiastic rave for TypePad AntiSpam set the stage, but huge blogs on every platform like ProBlogger have jumped on board. It's not just for big blogs, of course — regular bloggers like Myo Kyaw Htun have weighed in: "Last couple of months, I noticed that Akismet failed to prevent spam comments, trackbacks and pingbacks for my wordpress blog. Then I switched to Typepad Antispam as a test. I’m very pleased that it does pretty well and probably does better than Akismet."

Perhaps the most comprehensive comparison comes from Andrew Watson at Changing Way, whose extensive chart offers some great ways to contrast TypePad AntiSpam with the competition. (Only one service has a "yes" under "Open source engine" and a "yes" under "Free for commercial use"!)

Lastly, we haven't forgotten about our developer audience. We're happy to help more platforms adopt TypePad AntiSpam integration, or to update their Akismet implementations to support this new, free, open source alternative. Marcus Ramberg, a driving force behind popular Perl-based programming framework Catalyst, wrote Using TypePad AntiSpam with the Catalyst framework, and we're hoping to see more such adoption in the future.

Join us in the fight against comment spam

As you can imagine we're excited about the release today of TypePad AntiSpam. We've been working on the service for a year, we're happy to now share it with the world, and wanted to take this initial post to explain some of the key things that you need to know about this new service from Six Apart.

The fundamental mission of TypePad AntiSpam is to protect open blog comments from being abused by spammers. The service does this by combining several adaptive learning engines to score inbound comments, TrackBacks and Pingbacks, to determine whether they are "spam" or "ham." The filters learn from user reports, enabling TypePad AntiSpam to quickly adapt to new spam attacks.

TypePad AntiSpam grew out of the infrastructure and systems that we've built to protect the hosted TypePad blogging service. And now we're excited to make the service available for free for users of any publishing system, whether it's our own Movable Type platform or others.

In fact, one of the world's largest technology blogs, TechCrunch, has been running the beta of TypePad AntiSpam for the past week or so, and had good things to report about the service this morning, despite some early hiccups. "After a week I’m pleased to say that as good as Akismet is, the TypePad product has performed as good or better for us."

It's for bloggers

If you use TypePad for your blog, you don't have to do anything -- TypePad AntiSpam is already enabled. And if you want to see how easy it is to report spam on TypePad, check out the quick two minute screencast that's up at the Everything TypePad blog. Opening TypePad AntiSpam up to the rest of the world means more bloggers reporting spam, which will lead to the service being better able to respond to new types of spam attacks more quickly. And that means better protection for your TypePad blog.

If you use Movable Type or WordPress, you can download the free, open source plugins for your blog today. Today we're providing plugins for TypePad AntiSpam that work with Movable Type versions 3.x and 4.x, or with WordPress versions 2.3 or 2.5. And as of today the release candidate version of the upcoming Movable Type 4.2 includes the TypePad AntiSpam plugin built in.

It's for developers

If you're interested in building plugins for TypePad AntiSpam for other publishing platforms, we'd love to have you. Automattic's popular Akismet platform smartly implemented a dead-simple API for applications to make use of its service, and TypePad AntiSpam is 100% compatible with the Akismet API, meaning that if you're a developer and have built plugins for Akismet, it will be easy to adopt them for TypePad AntiSpam.

And if you're interested in building your own antispam service, we're making the framework behind TypePad AntiSpam available under an open source license (GPL v2, to be exact). This allows others to build and operate their own services -- even competitive services -- on top of our framework. We encourage developers who make use of the system to share what they learn with others who use the code.

It's free

TypePad AntiSpam is free, regardless of the type of blog you run, or the number of comments your blog receives. We take our mission seriously: we're committed to spam-free blogs and vibrant, healthy conversations online. Making the service free means that if your blog gets spammed, we don't profit -- instead, we share the pain.

It's beta

While we're proud of what we've been able to accomplish in filtering comment and TrackBack spam on TypePad, we know that as we open the service up to more users, that TypePad AntiSpam may encounter different types of spam that it hasn't seen yet, and hasn't had a chance to learn from. This is why we're designating the release as "beta" -- we expect the service to learn and get better from wider adoption, and we would love for you to help us make it better.

Join us in the fight against comment spam by visiting the Get Started page to download a plugin and register for an API key. It's free, simple and easy. And, of course, if you have feedback for us along the way, please let us know.