How Anti-Splog is Saving Edublogs

For those who don’t know, we (Incsub) run one of the largest WPMU sites on the web with hundreds of thousands of blogs and users. The trouble was that edublogs was getting overwhelmed by splogs with hundreds of new ones being created every day. We never came close to staying caught up with them, and running a few quick google searches for popular spam keywords would turn up thousands of splogs.

Finally realizing the futility of trying to hold back the tsunami of splogs, we set to work developing our new Anti-Splog plugin, not only for us but to share with the WPMU Dev community. After testing and tweaking this plugin on Edublogs for two months, it has helped us kill more than 20,000! And now our splog killing is practically on auto pilot. We just sit back and watch the Recent Splog queue pile up with new spam blogs the second those nasty little spammers try to post their annoying content.

Here is what Sue Waters, our Edublogs support guru has to say about Anti-Splog:

Working with Anti-Splog on Edublogs has been like a parent raising their own child that has become smarter and better at the task than its parent.

Spamming An IP

Initially we spent considerable time manually spamming splogs and adjusting its spamming rules to train it to identify splogs. However, as the API service is constantly improving and learning as increased numbers of splogs are spammed it is now able to detect even the most clever splogs, that most people wouldn’t spot, and automatically spam spam them immediately when they post.

And best of all there is no better feeling than clicking on spam next to the IP address and spamming 100+ splogs from the same IP, at the same time, for repeat spam offenders. We found one spammer’s IP through Anti-Splog and with one click cleared 1400 splogs out of our system!

While we still have a long way to go in clearing out older and inactive splogs, it is quite satisfying to know that we have stemmed the tide of new splogs, and the Anti-Splog API service is only getting more and more accurate. With our last test Anti-Splog was identifying over 90% of splogs automatically with less than a 3% false alarm rate. And it’s only been improving as more and more data is collected to learn from.

But don’t just take our word for it. Download the Anti-Splog plugin today and help us make some sploggers really mad!

You can read about the features of Anti-Splog here, and you can download it here.