Here's a Spam Karma 2 Plugin that takes advantage of the Akismet comment spam service.It still uses the API key (it must in order to access the service) so you will still need a WordPress.com account to use it.
It uses the karma level of a comment to determine whether that comment should be forwarded on to Akismet for analysis. I wonder what kind of impact this will have on the service's ability to track spam generally, since really spammy comments would be preemptively blocked and would not be forwarded to comprise Akismet's database of spam. Likewise, valid comments would also not comprise Akismet's not-spam database.
I wonder if people who need to select a plugin would choose Spam Karma with Akismet over just Akismet. There is an advantage to not having to set all sorts of options to get working spam prevention on your blog.
I think this new "plugin plugin" will serve well the folks who have had SK2 installed all along, but want the added benefit of the spam-preventing hive mind.
Thanks for your posting (and the linking).
And thank you for your feedback about the karma levels. I just wanted to take some of the load off the comment checking and thought if we already know it's spam, we don't need to check against yet another remote service. But these "sure" comments are being submitted to Akismet if SK2 is really sure it's spam or ham (which most of the time is the case), so Akismet can learn from it, too. But the settings are open for debate :-) ... they seemed to work in the two days I was testing it myself.
Greetings,
Sebbi
Would it not be usefull to block spam at the sk2 level but send them to Akismet anyway to help their spam db? I'm not sure how Akismet works but if their was a way to tag the comment it may help for the initial prevention and the long term prevention.
This very same thought occured to many people on the WordPress IRC channel, and I suppose that the plugin can be configured to do pretty much that by setting the constraining values very far outside the normal limits.
Matt said a comment should only be submitted if its answer was not the correct one. So I modified the plugin to always check against Akismet and only submit if it gave the wrong answer (automatically and manually when recovering or moderating a comment inside SK2).
[...] But, I just checked my WordPress dashboard, and saw an interesting item: Owen Winkler: Spam Karma 2 Akismet Plugin BETA. Hmmm… Akismet as a plugin for SK2? Cool! [...]
How can I get a wordpress.com account resp. an api-key
Hi Henry.
You need to have a wordpress.com account. When u have it, just sign-in and look for your api-key.
By the way, i think it's interesting that developer make things with akismet, wait for people feedback.
Regards
[...] Matthew Mullenweg, Spam Killa — The creator of WordPress has started a new web service called Akismet that blocks comment and trackback spam on the blogs of subscribers. A few days latter, Sebastian Schmieg released an Akismet plugin for Spam Karma 2, my spam-blocker of choice. (via) [...]