As a lot of you know, I've been busy refactoring
Blog4Umbraco over the last few weeks and
months, trying to drastically improve it's fortunes to support lots
of new features.
One of the things that has bugged me is that Akismet, the included comment spam
protection service, is only licensed for non-commercial usage, and
if you want to run a "commercial" blog (however you want to define
that), then you have to pay them some money. Now, that's all well
and good, but as a true Socialist (I vote
Lib Dem, for anyone who wants to know) I believe that certain
basics in life should either be free or be at substantially reduced
cost - healthcare, education, anti-virus
software, operating
systems,
CMS software... OK mostly software. I think spam-fighting kit,
with 87% of the Internet's traffic being made up of spam in one
form or another, is now a basic essential, and the right of every
good Internet citizen to possess at the very least basic security
to guard against it.
Anyway, I've found Akismet's "commercial" clause a little wooly in
the past, as a site that isn't e-commerce, nor has adverts, may
still be run by a company (hey, we're putting a blog on the new
Code Gecko site), and therefore is techncially "commercial" in
nature. Where does one draw the line? Answer: by making it free -
as in both free speech and free beer.
So on this note, I decided to hunt out some free blog comment
spam systems that would gladly allow commercial use, and found two
of particular note:
- BlogSpam.net
- a nice open-source option, with a hosted service for those who
don't want to run their own service, written by Steve Kemp. I
reckon this'd be ideal for high-traffic sites, cause it gives you
the option of running your own, which you can then
performance-tweak as and when you want.
- Pros - no API keys;
- Cons - few .NET wrappers (see below).
- TypePad AntiSpam by the guys from Six Apart. These are the same guys that
introduced the concept of TrackBacks, letting
bloggers "ping" each other instead of just pinging blog aggregate
services - an implementation of this is coming in Blog4Umbraco v3.
Their implementation is great cause it's the identical API to
Akismet, but with the "commercial use allowed" clause - great.
- Pros - Can use Joel.Net's Akismet
API library with a simple modification;
- Cons - said library requires recompilation, it's a hosted
service, and requires API
keys.
Now, both of these are lovely, but there's no .NET wrappers for
either of them. And as Scott
Hanselman and Linus
Torvalds say, "talk is cheap, show me the code".
BlogSpam.net
API wrapper
Joel.Net's
Akismet wrapper for TypePad AntiSpam
The BlogSpam.net API wrapper is MIT-licensed, as is pretty much all my
open-source stuff.
Joel.Net's Akismet wrapper is 3-clause-BSD-licensed, so I can't
take credit for anything except one line of code which changes the API URL from api.akismet.com to
api.antispam.typepad.com - look Ma, no hands.
I gladly released this on March 14th - aka International Pi Day
(3/14... *groan*), and the birthday of Albert
Einstein (14/3/1879, 132nd anniversary), Quincy Jones Jr. and Sir
Michael Caine (both 14/3/1933, aged 78), Jerry Greenfield of Ben
& Jerry's (14/3/1951, aged 60), and yours truly (14/3/1987,
aged 24).
Happy birthday to me, and enjoy!