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Interview with Denis Bernardy
Question 2
(read Question 1)

Denis, another question is submitted by the user of your Semiologic and it’s a peculiar question about one of the features there. You have a feature when someone makes a comment to the post to approve it, delete it or mark it as spam.

Question 2.
What happens exactly behind the curtain when you mark comment as spam?

They get flagged as spam and they are kept in a database. They are no longer shown on the blog obviously.

There are a handful of tools in WordPress that leverage the existing spam and conduct analysis whether a new comment is spam or not based on its similarity with previous comment marked as spam. That’s what happens at the background.

WordPress doesn’t do that by default, you have to get a plugin called Spam Karma which is extremely resource hungry.

When you activate Akismet it’s also used in the global pool of known spam in order to fight future spam that will look similarly to this comment that you’ve just marked as spam. There is a neural network that can potentially feed on this data that you are marking as spam. It makes it less likely to appear spam in future on your sites.

So we can say if you mark it as spam you are really joining the fight against spam comments.

Exactly. And that would assume that you activate a plugin that is neural network based - there are two (of them). There is Akismet which centralized. What happens is when you mark comment as spam you also tell Akismet "please send this comment to Akismet server", and within the Akismet server it gets stored for future reference, so that when there is a new spam it gets processed and compared to the existing/known spam - and this increases the probability of detecting the future spam, based on this database of spam items.

Read Question 3 about content theft here.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 6th, 2007 at 6:32 pm and is filed under Denis Bernardy - Semiologic. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.