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

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