One of the new announcements from SixApart (aside from MT 4.2) is making the (beta) TypePad Anti-Spam service (based on Akismet) available to MT 3 and 4 users (and WP 2.3/2.5).
Akismet is an external service that does various tests of the items (comments, trackbacks, etc.) as they come in, flagging them as good or not, but also accepting further feedback if someone reports something as spam that was accepted as good (or vice-versa). It’s been WordPress-oriented in the past.
Akismet has long been on my radar for anti-spam, but previous implementations for MT always looked a little problematic. Fact is, I don’t have a big spam problem here using the SpamLookup plugins that came with recent versions of MT. They tend to block out 99% of what’s out there (actually, from a Comment perspective, TinyTuring does the bulk of the job; most of what gets nailed / rejected — or inadverntely let through — is Trackback spam).
My questions:
- If it ain’t broke, should I fix it?
- Is the added traffic (checking items at the service site) a network/server burden or lag?
- Should I wait for it to get out of beta?
My inclination is to wait at least a bit to get some sense of the feedback on the Net about how it’s working (I’ve also subscribed to the blog 6A has put together for this). But I’m kind of pleased to see this new service being made available, and look forward to hearing more.