Timethief is a wonderful person, who was one of the first people I met on the wordpress.com forums. Had it not been for Options, I would never have visited them in the first place. Timethief has amassed over 7,000 posts of wonderful support for the bloggers at wordpress.com. So I find it completely shocking that:

• Both of them were asked to leave the forum
• Shortly thereafter, their forum accounts were suspended
• Timethief's blog, WPBloggingTips (yes, it's a blog that archives the helpful advice she gives out on the forums, so that the google-inclined can help themselves) was marked as "mature"1 .
• Timethief's IP was blacklisted in Akismet's spam database2

I'm honestly not as surprised that wank and options were banned from the forums. Their blogs, like mine, focus on highlighting issues with wordpress (theirs more the .COM side). The idea that automattic would go out of its way to silence Timethief, who has always held the community as her highest priority, is nonsensical.

This is a warning to anyone considering the use of Automattic's services: They do not have your interests in mind, and if you are ever displeased with the service you receive, they will not hesitate to use those services as weapons against you. Even for people considering the use of just Akismet, it should be disconcerting that you are not subscribing to an anti-spam service, you are subscribing to automattic's vehicle of censorship.

For your own sake, use Defensio, use Vox, tumblr, or blogspot, but stay away from wordpress.com, akismet, and wordpress.com stats. They will violate your privacy, and they will revoke their services at signs of your dissatisfaction.

1. The mature flag, if you're not aware, is the means by which blogs on wordpress.com are hidden from public view and denied the use of categories or tags. This, rather than the sensible solution of putting up an "Under 18" warning that blogspot employs.
2. Since Automattic, Inc. does not follow up with ISP's (or bloghosts for the splogs that are advertising via spam), she has no recourse with Telus.net to get a new IP address. So much for automattic caring a wit for the health of the blogging community.

Defensio launched their public beta today. I've been part of the private beta for a couple months now, after openly criticizing Akismet. Defensio is a similar tool, so it does fall prey to the same "wisdom of crowds" weaknesses. Defensio's usability far outstrips SK21 and Akismet2, and the launch of the website improves it a bit. Now there's an RSS feed for my spam. Granted, that's a little strange, but it's better than SK2's digest emails, which untrain google's filters by passing along spam content inside legitimate emails. I like having a choice in anti-spam measures, and especially one that's upfront about its accuracy, and that's cognizant of the need to police your own quarantine. Here's a couple screenshots to give you an idea of what it looks like:

1. gouge my eyes out ugly
2. requires plugins upon plugins to be usable

• WordPress is on Slashdot, courtesy of the above image.
• I've upgraded myself, although based on the number of offers for help installing Habari I landed myself with one comment on WW, I'm going to give Habari another shot in the near future.
• That thread made me realize that Habari is not a WordPress fork at all, but a WordPress clone. It's the same relationship that Pidgin (Gaim) has to AIM: most of the features, none of the crap, none of the code.
• My only reason for upgrading is to work on adding the tagging features to Disconnected and Dream in Infrared. Dream in Infrared will most certainly drop support for UTW, as well as any compatibility with 2.01 . Disconnected will be a bit more difficult, since I'll need to maintain UTW/2.0 support in parallel with 2.3's tagging.
• The above assumes, based on the announcement, that there were no security patches in 2.3. Like Anil says, though, things like that should be crystal fucking clear in the announcement. Then again, we are talking about matt, who needs public outcry to explain simple things like privacy policies.
• Further problems resulting from the Refusal To Explain Anything:
  as I was going through my list of plugins and upgrading them using SVN (it's even suggested in the announcement), i ran into more than a few plugins that are hosted on wordpress.org, but have to be updated the traditional way, because no one knows how to organize their repositories. The biggest offender is the Google Sitemap Generator, which has all of the translations in /trunk/. Subversion naturally balks at the encoding. Wget to the rescue.
• This is surprisingly not related to Matt or privacy, but I've switched to defensio anti-spam, because I'm a fickle sum-bitch, and easily enticed by betas. So far its false-positive ratio is about on par with Akismet, which has the usual social consequences (sorry Trent, Engtech). It does marry the excerpt concept from Akismet Auntie Spam with "Spaminess", which is vaguely similar to SK2's karma, giving it the best usability of the 3.

1. does this affect anyone? my information says no, please comment if it will.

So, after some 20-odd months and 25 thousand spams, I'm switching off of akismet. sort of. Spam Karma is great, but akismet still has a few tricks up its sleeve. There's a plugin1 to use akismet as part of spam karma. so if you have trouble commenting, send an email to wp-admin [at] archgfx [dot] net2.

I miss the "set it and forget it" of akismet, but that was kind of a pipe dream. SK2 is excessively fiddly, but on the other (far less popular) journals i use it on, it hasn't required any fiddling. Here, unfortunately, it requires a lot of fiddling, since the plugin defaults to a +7 karma for an akismet false positive. since akismet's accuracy is about 50/50 these days, that just doesn't make sense. So i turned down the strength of that plugin, and turned up the strength of SK as a whole.

1. a plugin for a plugin, i know, how fiddly can you get.
2. or, courtesy of NoWickedWitch, you can message me on Pownce

For a second, i thought it might be an overzealous supporter, leaving a real comment on an unrelated entry (i delete those, but don't feed them to akismet). Then I looked at the post the comment was attached to: urbanlab. The post is unremarkable, save one thing:

It has the lowest post ID on my blog. Only a bot would dig through my blog that way. any human would have commented on the most recent post.

So as for the question of whether Ron Paul is spamming digg? I have no doubt that he is, and that his "supporters" are using bots to do it, thinking they're doing him a favor. Although this does put me in the awkward position of agreeing with rush limbaugh.

web 2.0, meet political graft. This will be the year that online political polls show up DOA. unless they start feeding poll results to akismet.