"Official" integration with Akismet

[Pony99CA]

Reading akismet's site I don't get the impression that they mean to charge non-personal sites which are not blogs.

I agree. The About page said:

Free for personal use
That's right. Our goal is to eliminate web spam from as many sites as possible. So don't hesitate to grab a free API key for your personal blog.

The second sentence says "sites", not "blogs". The third sentence does say "blog", but I think that was just an example.

Anyway, I'd prefer to see a new "content analysis" plug-in system. The plug-in could support three results -- "good" (post immediately), "bad" (don't post) and "moderate" (put in the moderation queue). Somebody could write a plug-in for Akismet (even phpBB developers, like they do for ReCAPTCHA), but other systems could be supported. Akismet may be the best now, but nobody can say that somebody better won't come along later.

Steve

[callumacrae]

Anyway, I'd prefer to see a new "content analysis" plug-in system. The plug-in could support three results -- "good" (post immediately), "bad" (don't post) and "moderate" (put in the moderation queue). Somebody could write a plug-in for Akismet (even phpBB developers, like they do for ReCAPTCHA), but other systems could be supported. Akismet may be the best now, but nobody can say that somebody better won't come along later.

Unless Akismet really mess up, they'll be the best system for a very long time. They've had time to refine their algorithms, they've got the data from enough sites to catch nearly everything, and they've got the resources to handle pretty much anything. This isn't a market you can just walk into.

[Pony99CA]

Unless Akismet really mess up, they'll be the best system for a very long time. They've had time to refine their algorithms, they've got the data from enough sites to catch nearly everything, and they've got the resources to handle pretty much anything. This isn't a market you can just walk into.

I wonder how many search engine companies thought that before Google came around.

Anyway, the point is that phpBB probably shouldn't support just one specific service in core code. I feel that way about blacklists (why support Spamhaus but not other blacklists) and about avatars (why support Gravatar specifically; aren't there other avatar companies out there?).

I don't have a problem with phpBB.com developers creating a default plug-in to support a specific service, but we should allow admins to choose other services.

Steve

[callumacrae]

If you give a new admin a choice between Akismet and a few random rubbish ones, they'll select one at random. Let's stop being political here, and give the users what is best for them. Sure, allow them to choose others should they wish, but default to Akismet.

[Pony99CA]

If you give a new admin a choice between Akismet and a few random rubbish ones, they'll select one at random. Let's stop being political here, and give the users what is best for them. Sure, allow them to choose others should they wish, but default to Akismet.

I wasn't being "political", and I've advocated for removing the rubbish CAPTCHAs and only shipping Q&A (and maybe ReCAPTHA, on the principle that Google might make it useful again). I'm not arguing that the user must have a choice, just that the option to have a choice is available.

In fact, you basically just echoled what I wanted. I want an architecture that allows other content analysis plug-ins to be supported without having Akismet hard-coded into the core code. In other words, I want content analysis to be implemented like CAPTCHA support is, not like the blacklist support is. If phpBB only decides to ship with an Akismet plug-in, that's perfectly fine with me.

As an example of another content analysis plug-in, I've seen requests on phpBB.com to block posting if a post contained words in the censor list. Somebody could create a content analysis plug-in to do that without requiring phpBB to add an ACP option to support that feature. In fact, it would be nice if mutliple content analysis plug-ins could be chained, so somebody could use Akismet and one or more other plug-ins, too.

Steve

P.S. Personally, I find the posts in this topic saying that phpBB wouldn't ship support for something that required a paid service to be much more politicial. If a paid service does something best, why not support it? Maybe we should also ship support for a free alternative, but I have no problem with free software supporting paid services as long as it isn't required to use the paid to get the board to work.

[DavidIQ]

P.S. Personally, I find the posts in this topic saying that phpBB wouldn't ship support for something that required a paid service to be much more politicial. If a paid service does something best, why not support it? Maybe we should also ship support for a free alternative, but I have no problem with free software supporting paid services as long as it isn't required to use the paid to get the board to work.

There is nothing "political" about it. It's the principle of the matter. We offer a FREE forum software so why should we give a product that is a pay service free advertisement and the spotlight in a pretty major part of our software? Also what is to say that other pay services for whatever else you can think of would not want to jump in and start demanding that we include them in our software? An extreme and unlikely case, I'm sure, but we wouldn't be able to give a good response.

If Akismet is not requiring payment to utilize their services on a personal forum then I don't really see a problem with it but to say that we would include a plugin for them, make it the default option, and then people would be required to pay for their services simply because they're the "best" is pretty absurd. Also defaulting to Akismet is probably out of the question as it would require the administrator to enter their API key for the service. Are we really trying to make administrators setting up a board stop their setup, go to Akismet, get a key, wait for the confirmation email, and then be able to finish their forum setup? They'd just abandon ship altogether.

From looking at their ToS it seems likely they don't require that one pay for their services if it's for a personal site (though the signup form runs you through a guilt trip by asking "How much is Akismet worth to you?"), yet this page says otherwise:
https://akismet.com/signup/

If the case is that they don't require payment to use their services for forums then one of you that are fans of Akismet should get cracking on a plugin for inclusion.

[Pony99CA]

P.S. Personally, I find the posts in this topic saying that phpBB wouldn't ship support for something that required a paid service to be much more politicial. If a paid service does something best, why not support it? Maybe we should also ship support for a free alternative, but I have no problem with free software supporting paid services as long as it isn't required to use the paid to get the board to work.

There is nothing "political" about it. It's the principle of the matter. We offer a FREE forum software so why should we give a product that is a pay service free advertisement and the spotlight in a pretty major part of our software?

I view "principles" and "politics" as two sides of the same coin, but maybe that's just because of the recent U.S. elections and the "fiscal cliff" debacle. (Yes, politics often involves compromise, but the various sides usually start with their principles.)

As for giving the product a spotlight, why not if it's the best of it's kind? (More on that below.)

Also what is to say that other pay services for whatever else you can think of would not want to jump in and start demanding that we include them in our software? An extreme and unlikely case, I'm sure, but we wouldn't be able to give a good response.

The response is "We believe that it's the best available service today. Make your service better and we'll consider it." Alternate responses include, "Users requested this one more than yours", "Write a plug-in and submit it to our MOD DB" and "We do things our way, so shove off."

If Akismet is not requiring payment to utilize their services on a personal forum then I don't really see a problem with it but to say that we would include a plugin for them, make it the default option, and then people would be required to pay for their services simply because they're the "best" is pretty absurd. Also defaulting to Akismet is probably out of the question as it would require the administrator to enter their API key for the service. Are we really trying to make administrators setting up a board stop their setup, go to Akismet, get a key, wait for the confirmation email, and then be able to finish their forum setup? They'd just abandon ship altogether.

Of course you wouldn't do that. You'd make the pay service available but not the default -- for the same reason that you wouldn't make a service that requires registration (even if it's free) the default. These cases already exist in phpBB 3.0 -- ReCAPTCHA isn't the default CAPTCHA plug-in and Jabber isn't on by default.

If you insisted on having some content analysis plug-in on by default (which I don't think is necessary), you could write one that blocks posts with censored words (as I mentioned above) or something equally simple.

If the case is that they don't require payment to use their services for forums then one of you that are fans of Akismet should get cracking on a plugin for inclusion.

They might be able to write an extension, but a plug-in (like CAPTCHA and Search plug-ins) would require a dedicated API and ACP area. Or were you using "plug-in" to mean "extension"? (It gets kind of confusing now. )

Steve

[DavidIQ]

If Akismet is not requiring payment to utilize their services on a personal forum then I don't really see a problem with it but to say that we would include a plugin for them, make it the default option, and then people would be required to pay for their services simply because they're the "best" is pretty absurd. Also defaulting to Akismet is probably out of the question as it would require the administrator to enter their API key for the service. Are we really trying to make administrators setting up a board stop their setup, go to Akismet, get a key, wait for the confirmation email, and then be able to finish their forum setup? They'd just abandon ship altogether.

Of course you wouldn't do that. You'd make the pay service available but not the default -- for the same reason that you wouldn't make a service that requires registration (even if it's free) the default. These cases already exist in phpBB 3.0 -- ReCAPTCHA isn't the default CAPTCHA plug-in and Jabber isn't on by default.

That was actually directed at Callum since he was the one that suggested it.

If the case is that they don't require payment to use their services for forums then one of you that are fans of Akismet should get cracking on a plugin for inclusion.

They might be able to write an extension, but a plug-in (like CAPTCHA and Search plug-ins) would require a dedicated API and ACP area. Or were you using "plug-in" to mean "extension"? (It gets kind of confusing now. )

Steve

We currently have a CAPTCHA plugin system. Did I miss mention somewhere that we are removing it?

[Pony99CA]

If the case is that they don't require payment to use their services for forums then one of you that are fans of Akismet should get cracking on a plugin for inclusion.

They might be able to write an extension, but a plug-in (like CAPTCHA and Search plug-ins) would require a dedicated API and ACP area. Or were you using "plug-in" to mean "extension"? (It gets kind of confusing now. )

We currently have a CAPTCHA plugin system. Did I miss mention somewhere that we are removing it?

What we have here is a failure to communicate. I'm not sure how you inferred that from what I said.

To clarify (I hope), my suggestion is having a plug-in system for content analysis (similar to what we have for CAPTCHAs now). You said that people should start writing an Akismet plug-in for inclusion, but there's no plug-in system for content analysis yet, is there?

So I was confused whether you wanted people to write an Akismet extension (and were using "plug-in" to mean "extension") or to write a content analysis plug-in system and the Akismet plug-in for it (how could somebody write the plug-in without the underlying system?).

Steve

[DavidIQ]

Oh I see...I totally missed you had gone off-topic with that so I got confused. I'll try to keep up.