Solo Technology

I’ve been experimenting with the latest Anti-Spam WordPress plugin: Defensio. In general, it seems to work pretty well, but I have noticed some oddities.

Honestly, it really does work well. At first it didn’t seem to be learning very quickly — even marked one of my own comments as spam! Ouch, that hurt a little… But once I turned off the Bad Behavior plugin and let it process ALL the crap, it learned quickly. In spite of what you read below, I’m still sticking with it for now to see how things go.

To start with, the total spam counter seems odd, but until today I never really kept track. I just had vague suspicions that the adding was “off” a bit. Shortly after lunch today I had a kewl spam total, so I took a screen shot:

1337? How elite! Yeah, I’m easily amused.

A couple hours later, I checked again. 13 more spam found:

So, you’d expect total spam to be 1350, right? Nope. (note, picture below is a snip from the same screen shot as above)

1354 instead. I probably need to go re-read the FAQ ’cause I count differently.

Speaking of counting differently, check out this graph;

I’d expect a “Total Spam” graph to only go up. Yet it dropped a couple hundred spam one day last week. Odd?

Anyone else seeing things like this?

Frankly, as long as it continues to do the job, I’m not going to get all wrought up over miscounting a few spam. But it is odd, isn’t it?

9 Responses to “Defensio Counts Differently Than I Do”

1. Trent on November 25th, 2007 7:41 pm
   

   I am sure there are others that are using this, but sunburntkamel is the only one that i know who is using it right now. I will pass this thread along to him! How do you compare it to Akismet then?

2. adam on November 25th, 2007 8:29 pm
   

   total spam would go down if you had a sting of false positives, I suppose. or if they fixed a bug in how they count.

   if your spam comments are adding up faster than the number in queue, it probably means you have the “Automatic Removal of Spam” checkbox on under Plugins > Defensio Configuration.

3. Chris on November 25th, 2007 8:40 pm
   

   That would make sense, but alas… the box is not checked.

   And again, it isn’t actually causing me any problems. I just find it odd.

   You’re using Defensio as well? Did you, by chance, see a similar drop in counted spam around that same time frame?

4. adam on November 26th, 2007 6:05 am
   

   nope, mine rises fairly steadily.

5. Carl Mercier on November 26th, 2007 8:07 am
   

   Chris,

   What Adam said totally makes sense, I’m surprised you didn’t have that box checked. Can you make sure you’re using the latest version of the Wordpress plugin please?

   The drop in the number of spam indeed happens when you retrain.

   Cheers!

6. Carl Mercier on November 26th, 2007 8:09 am
   

   Oh, I forgot… using Defensio standalone will indeed help its accuracy a whole lot. That’s what we say in the FAQ and in the readme file, but I guess nobody’s reading those after all

7. Chris on November 26th, 2007 8:32 am
   

   Hi Carl - yep, latest version (just updated a couple nights ago).

   And yeah, I read the FAQ — that’s why you’ll see me mention I disabled Bad Behavior. I don’t tend to read FAQ’s until I… err… well, until I have Questions.

8. Carl Mercier on November 26th, 2007 8:35 am
   

   Chris,

   Fair enough! I personally always read the FAQ before installing stuff…*cough*cough*!

   Let me know if you still see that odd spam count behavior. We never ran into that issue and if there’s indeed something wrong, we’ll make sure to fix it.

9. Chris on November 26th, 2007 11:27 am
   

   Here’s some numbers from this morning.

   I was at 1474 Total Spam.

   Next time I checked, Defensio had 10.
   Total Spam was now at 1488 (4 extra).

   Next time I checked, Defensio had 8.
   Total Spam was now at 1498.

   This last one is interesting though — Defensio showed 9. Total spam now at 1503. Some adjustments going on?

   *shrug* As long as it keeps blocking spam, it’s all good. Accuracy is up to 98.6% and climbing.

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