In the three plus years I’ve been working at Automattic the company has grown quite a bit. The number of services has increased and there are over four times as many people. And the growth of WordPress.com has been amazing.
During that time I’ve worked in several areas; bug fixing, stats, themes, comments, rssCloud, PubSubHubbub, webhooks, the list goes on. Today starts a new focus for me at Automattic: Akismet. Most of my previous responsibilities are being transitioned to other people and teams.
So what will this change of focus mean? For now my responsibilities on Akismet will focus on public facing projects, like the Akismet WordPress plugin for instance.
I’ve been a happy user of Akismet for many years, now being able to work on such a critical product is very exciting.
13 replies on “A New Focus”
New title… Spam Exorcist? 🙂
That would be pretty funny 🙂
spam comments have been growing, and I also had been being blocked when I add 1 or 2 links in my comments
I hope you guys are able to make akismet even more precise than it is today, websites interactivity needs it 😀
You may find some sites moderate comments with any links in them.
So what’s slated on the drawing board for Akismet? What’s top priority?
I actually moderate comments with any link in them and I love Akismet because it is doing an excellent job in stopping spam.
But what I want to Akismet to add on top of what it’s doing some of wp hashcash functionality. Right now, Akismet+wphascash stops the spammers dead on their tracks. But here I am hoping for one plugin activation instead of another install.
The least number of plugins installed on my WP is always great, IMHO. But besides that, the only problem left is the manual spammers.
Congratulations! Akismet is such a great tool.
It’d be cool to see those ‘Spam Exorcist’ business cards 😉
One thing that I would like changed with Askimet is where you get the API key from. For me it has always seemed a bit of a nuisance having to go to wordpress.com to use a plugin on your website.
Just a suggestion, thanks.
I can only speak to what I’ll be working on, the rest of Team Akismet has other priorities 🙂
As mentioned in the post, the Akismet WordPress plugin is going to have my attention for now.
You can register for an API key right on akimset.com as well – http://akismet.com/get/
Yeah I know, but I don’t config comments with links to go to spam trash and still they go, I’ve been receiving some comments with dozens of links and they are marked as spam.
And I also like to link posts in my site that talk in more details about stuff I’m commenting, and I see this behavior is very rare and therefore it’s detected as spam.
There’s no difference in performance if you have 2 features in 2 plugins or same 2 features in a unique plugin, the same come will be run anyway.
The difference is that, when they are in the same plugin, both can interact with fear of the other plugin isn’t activated and its feature isn’t available.
Just get good quality plugins with good quality code and with performance optimization in mid and u’re good.
Congratulations! What an awesome assignment. I’ve always thought Askimet was one of the more deceptively brilliant ideas Automattic has implemented over the years; by leveraging a central position amongst thousands (millions?) of nodes, it was best able to detect spam patterns launched and propagated across a network. It’s a really valuable service.
Can’t wait to see the future direction for it!