Wow, seems like there was much talking round me… and none of my faithful legion of evil minions bothered to inform me…
Well, I really don’t have time to get into a debate about everything that’s been said, plus, for some complicated reason way too long to explain, I am boycotting the forums, but I’ll try to clear up a few misunderstanding and add my two yens:
1) As of this week (the release of WP 1.5.1 to be precise), SK 1.x is absolutely no longer supported. While I consider it a reasonably fine piece of code, it also contained many small bugs and shortcomings, all of which have been addressed in a way I saw fit, and made into SK 2. If, for one reason or another, you do not want to upgrade, feel free to use SK 1 (or another spam plugin for all I care), but please, DO NOT COME WHINING THAT IT ISN’T WORKING. SK 1.x is obsolete. Period.
2) Now, SK2 is not quite perfect yet, and it’s in the very final stage of beta-testing (frankly more stable than quite a few “release”-grade software out there), but every single issue pinpointed with SK1 was addressed. So far, it has yielded an extremely low rate of false positives, all of which were either due to a bug that was fixed, or some particularly blurry case, where even a human could have been fooled.
3) The point about “boastful” messages and the fact bots don’t read them is totally true. Yet, most boasts in real life hardly serve a purpose of impressing whoever you are boasting to. They are merely there as a way to channel anger or irritation at something. Spammers are an excruciatingly annoying breed, boasting of how many spams were squashed doesn’t achieve much purpose, but it sure feels nice. As for any sort of accusatory tone in the “comment denied” message, it was *long* removed from SK. Any blog still showing that message is badly out of date. There again, I can’t be held responsible for people who do not realize a plugin needs to be updated every once in a while, especially when it’s dealing with stuff like spam.
3) I personally think that the “manually edit htaccess” method is a ridiculous waste of time (for every daily minutes you spend doing that, may I remind you it takes the spammer a tenth of a second configuring his bots). I also have some serious reserve with the technical aspect (performance hit etc) of this method.
Referrer Karma is indeed a good way to automate that, and works nicely with SK (it will be soon improved to work with SK2), but it most definitely isn’t perfect and yields many unavoidable false positives too (except these are not a big problem, since they merely mean redirecting the visitor, which is hardly noticeable).
4) Regarding false positives: keep in mind that practically every single comment mistakenly stopped by SK would likely have been mis-identified by most other spam plugins as well. Not trying to launch a war of the plugins here, just pointing out that there are *no* perfect plugin out there, and what usually screws up SK (or used to), would do the very same to any of the many plugins using similar detection devices. For more details, please read my lengthy entry on the topic:
https://www.unknowngenius.com/blog/wordpress/spam-karma/false-positives/
5) I have said it before (in a message that was mysteriously edited out of the forums), but frankly: I don’t care if you use SK or not.
I mean, if you encounter a bug, report it to me, and help me work through it, I’ll fix it. I think quite a few people should be able to testify for that.
I strive to improve it, and for no other reason than: a) personal pride b) it is useful to me and people I care about (including the community at large).
As you can see, “business plan”, “financial incentive” or anything that would pertain to keeping “customers” happy doesn’t appear in my motivations. So some of the whiners would better start realizing that this is free software, and while I’m sure grateful for the support, donations and thank-you notes from satisfied users, I am not about to lose sleep over the fact that some users just do not like it.
If you feel like there’s a better solution out there, just go for it! As long as you are making an informed choice and weigh the pros and cons of whatever method you use, I am 100% in favour of plugin diversity: it is the #1 way to fight spam!
6) As for the person who, I gather, has been making some generalization about how SK was universally reviled: I guess we don’t quite live in the same world… A quick search around google will show you that there are many thousands of people currently running it: that’s a lot of masochistic people, huh… additionally, very conservative estimates would give a total number of spams stopped so far by SK, way into the millions: with even a few hundred false positives (which is way less than ever was reported or mentioned to me), that is a success rate somewhere in the 99.9%… I don’t really see any reason to hide my head in shame for that.
I note, however, that except for the occasional moron posting insults on my blog because of what he assumes to be personal censorship geared directly at him (and usually doing so at the bottom of the very page explaining why it’s not), and the people contacting me in good-faith for help solving their bugs, most of the dissatisfied users seem to consider it incredibly more productive to whine about it in private or on their own blog, rather than ever contacting me… I still fail to see if this kind of people consider it is my duty to browse the web day and night, looking for such post and bending over backward to help them, or if they just need to vent their anger and frustration at some random person/software.
But anyway: don’t worry for me, my skin is much thicker than that. I’ve long stopped caring too much, and who knows I might end up stopping to care at all (no, not quite yet).
As I said and will say once again: if you have an issue with SK2 (and SK2 alone) and want it solved, simply contact me (preferably by email, or by leaving a comment on the SK page) and I’ll do my best to address it. On the other hand, if you just want to whine about it: feel free to go ahead, see if I care.
