WordPress MU

Days away (by April 10th). I'm just finishing off the website so people can download it directly
-Monty

Monty says;

You'll be able to directly download it from here:

http://montyspam.net/

Release: May 11th, 2008

Sounds amazing. Can't wait... btw, will it be free to use for everyone or this is another Akismet? Sory, but I have to ask.

My feeling is that it will be free for the first 3 months, and then some kind of pay 'what you think it's worth'. If at the end of 3 months, you think it's worth zero then you don't need it :-) And Monty is one hungry snake.

Personally, for my sites it has effectively ended the Spam problem totally, but then again hundreds of hours have gone into the coding and testing. I'm not sure of what the deal is with Akismet, so I can't really compare.

macgruder, do I get a discount since my birthday is May 13th? ;)

Also: what's a ham?

I'm thinking "ham" is non-spam :). Looks good, i'll be waiting to give it a run considering I have 140+ spamming robots visit my site per day, so it'l be interesting to see how much it decreases.

Well that "pay what you think it's worth" sounds good but I don't think that people will give you more than 5 bucks. So what You should do is give it for free for 3-6 months and than charge it $20 bucks. If it worths, you'll sell thousands of copies and most probably get hired by WordPress or Google. If not, you'll spend most of your life replying support forum posts... and than you die:)

How does it effect the database performance?

Oh yeah, I'd pay $20.

Boonika:
I'll probably have a different structure for Wordpress MU and Wordpress for payment, and perhaps have a minimum of let's say $25 dollars or something. I'm not sure it will sell thousands though :-)

Suleiman:
Mr. Brian is correct; Ham is non-spam!

honewatson:
It should improve database performance because once a spammer is identified the ip is noted, and the user is blocked before the page is loaded. Since spam often comes in bursts from the same ip this helps. You can choose how quickly the ip block is implemented. The only time additional load is put on the system is when the post itself is analyzed.

An important point for me and Monty (being different and all :-) is that the system never straight blocks legitimate users, and further legitimate users are not presented with a captcha. In other words the access to your site should not be impacted at all for legit users.

This is where Monty excels - he doesn't use a heuristic approach (i.e. governed by rules that spammers can easily adapt to and often block good users anyway); instead he uses a probabilistic approach based on the patterns of actual spammers. You can't really adapt to this because there are no rules to adapt to. Of course, the system has worked well for me, (and Ovidiu) but we'll have to wait and see. One issue is that Monty needs to be trained which means that you need to be a little patient with him at first while he learns the patterns of your users. I'll be interested to see how quickly this happens.

Should read "instead he uses a probabilistic approach based on the patterns of actual spammers, and legitimate users"

yeah, right - worked and still works perfect for me but only using it on a non-production server aka test server but I am very pleased with it.

@mcgruder
sorry I couldn't mail you about this latest issue but can't access my email right now so here is the issue:

I am getting lots of spam trackbacks lately, mostly nexium, levitra, viagra related and all those trackbacks monty keeps asking me about, although he gives them a 0.998 percentage and I already got hundreds of those and confirmed all as spam, he still keeps asking. AND they all get put into moderation queue...

These trackbacks do not contain more than 1 link and I set up wpmu to put all comments with more than 2 links into moderation, so I have no clue whats wrong.

BTW. you can still contact me by email, just can't access it right now.

Ovidiu - that problem is actually fixed and you'll get it in the latest update! A small bug meant that trackback sites that were inaccessible were being marked as 'monty, please check this' even when they had high ratings. Now they are just silently marked as spam.

>> I set up wpmu to put all comments with more than 2 links into moderation.

In fact, Monty ignores this setting. There's a good reason for that. Monty uses the number of links as a probabilistic device anyway, and the more links the more likely Monty will mark as 'very spammy', and because he learns the more accurate he becomes if you let him do all the work. More than 5 links are just treated equally as 'many links.' Thus good users can still post links, and you/your users are not bothered by thousands of 'please check this' for all those spams with many links. Monty spots them and disposes of them.

That is interesting Ovidu. Lately Askimet has been letting a lot more trackback spams through on my wordpress.com blog.

cool, I'll wait for the update.

btw. are you going to have a simple wp (as opposed to wpmu) version ready for testing soon?

sorry, just found the missing info on the website:

Release : May 11th, 2008 for Wordpress MU; approx May 23rd for Wordpress

>> That is interesting Ovidiu. Lately Askimet has been letting a lot more trackback spams through on my wordpress.com blog.

honewatson,
Monty stops pretty much all of them - 17,000 in the last couple of months. Ovidiu's install is stopping them but a now-fixed bug was asking for confirmation when it wasn't needed.

Ovidiu
Yes hopefully the single user will be released shortly.

waiting it

mazzika@live.com

MazZziKa
Hey, you don't need to post your email anymore, you'll be able to download it directly.

So... when will it be released?

:-) the counter changed from 0 days to "within the next 24hours" :-)

but don't worry its worth waiting... that is if you get enough spam so that it learns but I think thats the smallest problem ;-) anyone has to worry about about.

woohoooo it IS releasing on my birthday!

Is it available yet?

looks like no birthday present for Suleiman :(

I'm hoping to get it out in the next 8 hours :-) Just final testing of stuff. Suleiman, I'll ask Monty about a birthday present, and see what he says. He's a moody bugger though so no guarantees :-)

macgruder- It sounds like you've created a great-working plugin, good job.

A few questions.

1) This sounds like SK2 and Bad Behavior rolled into one. Is that the case? Does Montyspam improve on that combo?

2) Possibly the answer to my first question: how does Montyspam play with caching plugins such as wp-cache2 and Donncha's Super Cache? SK2 isn't yet compatible with Super Cache but is compatible with wp-cache2, and since SK2 has become completely indispensable for me, any changes I introduce to my WPMU setup must be compatible

3) Is Montyspam compatible with 1.5.1?

Hey, I'm not sure about the caching issue, but I don't see it being a problem. But to be honest I have no idea.

I'm not sure that it is better than SK2 or Bad Behaviour but in my mind it does it does have a few advantages. It's Bayesian. This means it learns and however Spammers may adapt it's not really possible to beat. This works both ways. BB is governed by rules and if say a user breaks a rule - a bad provider say then the block is absolute. Monty on the other hand notices that although the user has done something that is spam like perhaps this is offset by other tokens that are legitimate. Monty then assigns a probability, and depending on the probability the user can be blocked or not.

I liked SK2 but found it quite complicated. Also, there is a need to check messages for 'just in case'. Monty doesn't work like that. He assesses the user and if the user is very spammy he presents a captcha or other test. If the user doesn't pass, then they are blocked in totality. Even if they pass the message is held for further checking. If a user is medium spammy then he tells you because it means 'hey, I couldn't quite assess that'. Could you check for me. Stats on my site are thus:

80,000 spam blocks.
60 check needed (mainly at the beginning)
4 errors
(The errors were all in the early stages. As far as I know, he hasn't made an error in the last 75,000 spams).

Monty is run by the Admin alone so doesn't rely on the users doing it. However, if a user contradicts his assessment he lets you know. Usually, this is a case of an unknown.

I've run locally on 1.5.1 and it works fine.

Monty has been released for early testing on http://montyspam.net/

If you do have problems, please don't post here but contact me as directed in the script.

I would advise most users to wait a week or so unless you have a site that is not major, and you don't mind discovering bugs on :-)

What does montyspam do to the table structure?