A few hours ago, I installed the freshly-minted version 2.3 of Spam Karma 2, disabled Akismet, and enabled SK2. So far, so good. I had some database trouble previously with version 2.2 which necessitated a rather messy disabling of the plugin and fallback to Akismet… which meant I had to deal with several spam comments sent to my moderation queue every hour for manual sorting.

This was actually the reason I switched from Akismet before, and when I was using SK2 previously, comment spam wasn’t burning any of the brain-cycles I can’t spare, so I’ll be happy to have those back. Anyone using SK2 that hasn’t upgraded, I recommend doing so. Rather than simply using a blacklist or whatever, it actually uses several different tactics to score each comment, each tactic being configurable as to how it rates each comment. Too low a score, it’s spam; high enough and it appears seamlessly. In the middle, it goes to moderation, and this is where it slams Akismet’s performance in my opinion… I might get a couple of comments per day to approve or not… about 20 or 30 times fewer than I have with Akismet. To boot, it’s much much easier to find and retrieve any false positives than is Akismet.

All of that noted, send me an email if you notice any comment anomalies.