Akismet support in DasBlog
DasBlog 1.9 was recently released and contained many new features worth the upgrade. As a member of the development team, I've been running the nightly builds anyway, so I was surprised to read how much functionality people were missing out on by still running the previous public release.
One feature that I've never been satisfied with is the anti-spam support. We've had CAPTCHA support for some time, but it has been finicky, and as a frequent commenter myself, I find it an annoying solution. I've become spoiled by Thunderbird and its automatic spam filtering of my email, so I expect the same for my blog. When I became aware of Akismet, I was sold immediately. Akismet provides automatic spam filtering for blogs: you run comments to your site through their service and they tell you if they're junk. They provide a simple REST web service API to make it easy to integrate with your blog software of choice. Phil Haack made it even sweeter by wrapping the Akismet API in a nice C# object model for use in Subtext. By the glory of open source software, I was able to pluck the code out of the Subtext Subversion repository and drop it in the DasBlog repository. A little glue and UI polishing later, and DasBlog now supports intelligent, adapting, and automatic comment moderation.
To be clear, Akismet support was added after the 1.9 release. If you download the official release, the Akismet options will not be available. I expect we will put out a 1.9 point release sometime in the next couple months, but can make no guarantees. If you want this feature as much as I did, you can install one of the nightly builds from http://dasblog.info/dbftp/ (get 1.9.6276 or later). There has been very few changes since the official release, so I don't think you need be concerned about stability. Go check it out and let me know what you think!
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