Using Waegis to Fight Comment Spam

I recently switched blogging software from WordPress to GraffitiCMS, not because WordPress was bad or anything but because I wanted the flexibility of hosting my own blog running on Windows.

Graffiti does a good job of determining what is spam as far as comments or trackbacks goes but I still have to approve or delete those comments Graffiti thinks is spam.   It is time consuming some days and I have been looking for something to help out – so enters Waegis (pronounced veegis), developed by Keyvan Nayyeri.

The Waegis web site lists the goals of the service:

• Help the world: Spamming is wasting many resources from the human. From a technical perspective, it uses the server resources for sites, makes them dirty, and has a negative effect on the content. From another view, it wastes a lot of time from site owners, webmasters and bloggers to manage their sites. There is no doubt that the success of such a service is very good for the world. Just suppose that it can save 15-30 minutes from owners and visitors of a site. Many of these guys are technical people so their time worth it!
• Achieving the minimum fault ratio: In fact, the success of such a service depends on the number of users and sites that it hosts and also its fault ratio. Here fault ratio is defined as false-positive and false-negative and the less values for both rates is better. Other services were showing some signs of ineffectiveness before Keyvan starts the project so he tried to join them in order to stand against spamming.
• Simplicity: simplicity is what Keyvan always follows in his works and this time he tried to bring simplicity to this platform.
• Targeting Web 3.0: As long as we move on and web grows, spammers bother us with their works and we need to evolve with them. So Waegis tries to target web 3.0 to make it cleaner from spams.

Waegis supports both Free Accounts as well as Commercial Accounts of which I am going free for now but will upgrade if the system works well over my test period and I go over the API limit of the free version.  There is also documentation for developers wanting to utilize the Waegis API in their applications.

Installation consisted of a simple-to-install plug-in for Graffiti which will work in conjunction with Graffiti’s spam filter.  You just have to download the plugin, unzip and copy files to the bin folder of your Graffiti site.  The Waegis plugin now appears in the Graffiti-Admin site with some simple settings:

I get spam on a regular basis and only time will tell how well this system works, but I am hopeful.  I have had the filter on for a few hours now and have yet to see spam come to my site.  The service is in beta at the time of this writing.