TypePad AntiSpam is here -- spread the word!

We've been fighting spam at Six Apart almost as long as we've been creating blogging tools. Auren Hoffman has written about the "black hat tariffs" that in essence act as a tax on the consumer Internet, imposed by bad actors. We made huge strides improving our spam fighting on TypePad over the last year, and services like Akismet have done a great job fighting the good fight for blogs of all shapes and sizes. However, we felt like we needed to do more to reduce the cost of spam, which siphons away resources that should otherwise be used to move blogs forward.

So we have opened up our TypePad AntiSpam service to everyone, for free. This will help improve the TypePad service for TP members, but also means that anyone, Movable Type, or WordPress, or other blogger, small or large, can get free spam protection.

But in addition to free, we made it open. We released the framework in open source so now you too can create your own anti-spam service! We hope that by making the backend open, it will help the fight by encouraging more services to emerge to fight this scourge. Thanks to Justin Mason, who knows more than a bit about fighting spam, for testing the service and giving our OSS move the thumbs up.

TypePad AntiSpam now joins an impressive line up of open source projects that we maintain. It's an often overlooked aspect of Six Apart -- we play a key role in many technologies that are vital to Web 2.0 and the internet.

TechCrunch was also really kind to test the service and so far seems to be getting good results: "[a]fter a week I'm pleased to say that as good as Akismet is, the TypePad product has performed as good or better for us." But this isn't a move against Akismet -- it's a move against spam -- and to help eliminate black hat taxes. While we feel good about how the service has performed to date, we need to be humble that the bad guys can always strike back hard.

The new TypePad AntiSpam blog has some details about ow the service works, and will post updates:

The fundamental mission of TypePad AntiSpam is to protect open blog comments from being abused by spammers. The service does this by combining several adaptive learning engines to score inbound comments, TrackBacks and Pingbacks, to determine whether they are "spam" or "ham." The filters learn from user reports, enabling TypePad AntiSpam to quickly adapt to new spam attacks.

A huge thanks and kudos to all the folks at Six Apart who have worked tirelessly to make this happen. Spread the word!