Defensio supports OpenID, upgrades the plugin, and keeps helping us keep our blogs spam free

I got the tip on Friday that my favourite anti-spam plugin for WP was getting a major update… they announced it yesterday/today (Heri got the jump on me)

Big day for Defensio! Why? Because we’re rolling out a boatload of new functionality: Source: Defensio, the blog » Blog Archive » Defensio Does OpenID

The big news is that Defensio now supports OpenID, which I didn’t at first realize was a big deal until I read more about it in the Defensio post and Heri’s post as well:

Mat Balez also explains this will increase the accuracy of the algorithm — I guess he means Defensio will aggregate comments left by a same OpenID user on various blogs, thus allowing their system to compute the level of spaminess of the user much easily. Source: Defensio now supports OpenID | Montreal Tech Watch

OpenID in a spam plugin?  Gimmick right?  Why?  Just ’cause the other cool kids are doing it?  Clearly my first impression was dead wrong.  With OpenID tied to the anti-spam plugin then comments you make across the Net can be whitelisted faster (approved, maybe depending on the bloggers feelings).  There is huge potential there.  Just huge.

Oh and yeah Defensio is just plain better too.  They, like Akismet, added the separation of comments from trackbacks (trackback spam is getting pretty bad of late isn’t it?).  Still the better, imho, presentation of spam by just hiding the really spammy stuff.  Love it.  And, like Heri said in his post, it’s doing a pretty darn good job (this is from my personal blog):

Here’s my advice to Automattic: Buy Defensio.  Really.  Nothing against Matt and Akismet, it is a great plugin and system, Defensio is just doing a better job and has some great ideas for spam management.

So if you have Defensio installed, upgrade it, if you don’t, try it.  I’ve been using it since its pre-release days and haven’t had a second thought about it.  Yeah I’m biased–I really like stuff that works!